Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to censor Covid-19 content

August 27, 2024

Aug 27 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms (META.O)Opens a new tab CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured the company to “censor” COVID-19 content during the pandemic, referring to demands from the White House to remove misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.

In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that he regretted not speaking up earlier about this pressure, as well as other decisions he made to remove certain content owned by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In July 2021, Democratic President Joe Biden said social media sites like Facebook were “killing people” for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be published on its platform.

Former White House press secretary Jen Sagi and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have said publicly that the agency is not doing enough to dispel misinformation, making it harder to fight the epidemic and save lives.

At the time Facebook said it was taking “aggressive steps” to combat such misinformation. Even as vaccine lies continued to circulate on social media, the Biden administration eventually eased its criticism.

In a letter to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Monday, Zuckerberg said his company was under “pressure” to “censor” content and would back down if faced with such demands again.

“In 2021, senior officials in the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a great deal of frustration to our teams when we disagreed,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was filed by the Justice Department. Published by the group on its Facebook page.

“I believe the government’s pressure was misplaced, and I regret that we were not more open about it,” he wrote. “I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t have made today.”

The White House said in a statement that the administration is promoting responsible actions to protect public health and safety in the face of a deadly pandemic.

“Our position is clear and consistent: We believe that technology companies and other private actors must take into account the effects of their actions on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they provide.”

Zuckerberg recently tried to appeal to conservative users, calling Republican candidate Donald Trump “bad” for an assassination attempt and responding to right-wing podcasts. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, is a longtime Trump ally.

In his Facebook post, the Judiciary Committee called the letter “a big win for free speech” and Zuckerberg acknowledged that “Facebook censored Americans.”

In the letter, Zuckerberg said he would not make any contributions to support the election infrastructure in this year’s presidential election and “will not play a role one way or another” in the November vote.

During the last 2020 election held during the pandemic, the billionaire gave $400 million through the Zuckerberg Initiative to support election infrastructure. Action is biased.

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Nandita Bose in Washington and Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bangalore report; Editing by Miral Fahmy, Heather Timmons and Jonathan Oatis

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