Biden-Harris administration ‘repeatedly pressured’ Meta to censor COVID-19-related posts: Zuckerberg

Biden-Harris administration Meta pressure: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta’s teams to censor COVID-19-related posts. The revelation, which was made in a letter addressed to the committee, shines a light on how involved the government became in getting social media platforms to moderate content during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg said that senior officials from within the Biden administration — including White House officials — put “immense pressure” on his company and Meta to take down specific COVID-19-related articles or posts. The subject matter classified for deletion went from serious journalism, to parody and even instances of users taking sarcastic jabs at political figures. It created what Zuckerberg called “quite a bit of frustration” after Meta’s moderators didn’t follow through entirely.

In 2021, Biden Administration senior officials, the White House in particular, kept pressuring our office to take down certain COVID-19 related content including but not limited to ensuring if content constitutes “humour” or not and “satire” and expressed their dissatisfaction with our office because we would not comply, yet we again decided not remove the content. We are fully responsible for those decisions, also when it came to COVID-19 related changes of enforcement on subject matters from similar context, Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg also expressed regret for not doing more to denounce the influence of then-President Obama’s administration at the time. “I wished I’d spoken out publicly about government overreach sooner,” he added.

Zuckerberg’s letter also addressed another source of controversy: how the Hunter Biden laptop story was treated in the run up to last year’s election. He claimed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had tipped off Meta about a possible Russian disinformation campaign regarding the Biden family and Burisma, which caused Meta to demote a story on corruption allegations against Joe Biden’s family. However, Zuckerberg conceded that it was not Russian disinformation and that the article should not have been demoted.

"That fall, when we saw a New York Post story alleging that then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had done something corrupt and that was spreading on a bunch of different news sites, I knew that that would be bad if it spread on our platform," Zuckerberg said in the hearing. So I got my team together and we’re like ‘okay, we’re going to take this seriously and make sure this isn’t Russian disinformation, but we’re also not going to allow misinformation,’" she said.

The House Judiciary Committee's Republican account tweeted about the comments Tuesday night, calling them "a major win for free speech." The remarks are likely to add fuel to an ongoing debate about whether government should have more power over the content moderation policies of social media platforms.