WASHINGTON—Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told a House panel that he decided to stop contributions to help local governments administer elections in an effort to avoid claims of political bias, after such spending in the 2020 election set off alarms among Republicans.
Zuckerberg also said he wished the company had been more vocal about pushing back against pressure from the Biden administration to restrict some Covid-19 related content.
The billionaire Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonprofits to help conduct elections during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
While many localities said the money was a lifeline helping them register voters, set up socially-distanced voting booths and provide equipment to sort mail-in ballots, among other uses, Republicans said that the money, which they dubbed “Zuckerbucks,” unfairly benefited Democratic areas. More than two dozen mostly Republican-leaning states have now banned, limited or regulated the use of private funds to manage elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“Despite the analysis I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”
Jordan has been targeting tech giants in general and Zuckerberg in particular over what he alleges is censoring of conservative views. Last year, he threatened a vote on holding Zuckerberg in contempt over failing to turn over internal company documents. That document request was connected to decisions by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, over when and whether to ban accounts or suppress posts.
Republicans had alleged that the company’s content-moderation decisions effectively censored information that was meaningful to Republicans. Many Democrats see social-media companies as too lax in fighting what they view as hate speech and other harmful content.
In his letter to Jordan, Zuckerberg said that Meta “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Post story about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. The Post said at the time that its reporting was based on email exchanges between the two Bidens that were provided by allies of President Donald Trump, who in turn said they received them from a computer-repair person who found them on a laptop. At the time, dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter that then-candidate Biden cited in a presidential debate saying that the release of the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Zuckerberg also said that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including from 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.” At the time, Facebook’s publicly stated goal was to push millions of people toward Covid-19 vaccines. In his letter, Zuckerberg didn’t indicate whether he had changed his mind about that goal or whether he simply felt that the Biden administration had gone too far.
The Supreme Court in June rejected a lawsuit filed by two GOP-led states alleging that Biden administration officials unlawfully pressured social-media platforms to remove content flagged as disinformation. The court ruled that neither the states, nor the several individuals who also sued, could show that restriction of their speech online was a result of pressure from government officials on social-media companies.
“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 all of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he said.
At the time, Democrats were concerned that social-media companies were serving as platforms for misinformation about the vaccine.
Mariah Timms contributed to this article.
Write to Siobhan Hughes at Siobhan.hughes@wsj.com
