Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media and tech giant Meta, in a letter to the US Congress' House Judiciary Committee, has alleged that the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" his company to censor posts related to COVID-19, ANI reported.
Zuckerberg added that he "regrets not being more outspoken" and that some decisions Meta made, would not be made today "with the benefit of hindsight and new information", the report said.
In his letter, Zuckerberg detailed that in 2021 senior officials from the Biden administration and the White House "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire".
He added that these officials "expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree", but noted that the final decision to censor content was made by Meta. "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg said.
He added that the pressure was "wrong" and that he regrets not being more outspoken against it. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today," Zuckerberg wrote.
"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 and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again," he added.
Zuckerberg also detailed another episode where he alleges that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "warned" Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, the ANI report added.
Following the FBI warning, Zuckerberg claims that Meta demoted a story on corruption allegations involving Biden's family, but "shouldn't have".
"That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," he stated.
The House Committee on the Judiciary, of the Republican Party shared Zuckerberg's letter on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).
"Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech.," the post read.
(With inputs from ANI)
