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 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.
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Nandita Bose in Washington and Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bangalore report; Editing by Miral Fahmy, Heather Timmons and Jonathan Oatis
Our Standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
