Mark Zuckerberg Is Really Sorry for Censoring You
29th August 2024
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that the government pressured his company to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic and said he regrets following their wishes. The committee described his comments as a “big win for free speech.”
Meta produced thousands of documents for the committee’s investigation into alleged government censorship and Zuckerberg wrote the supplemental letter to outline what he had learned during the process. “In 2021, senior officials from 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 lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said. Zuckerberg said content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop was also in the sights of government officials, as the FBI approached Meta and warned stories of Biden family corruption were part of a “potential Russian disinformation operation.” Meta complied by demoting articles related to these issues.
“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg wrote. He promised that his company would be ready to push back on government pressure in the future and said he wished he had handled the situation differently ahead of the 2020 election.