Zuckerberg 'regrets' censoring Facebook at Biden's behest

Published 28 August 2024 at 17.02

Foreign. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, now says he regrets that the company caved to censorship pressure from the Biden administration during the pandemic. Zuckerberg now says that the White House's actions were “wrong” and that he plans to resist similar influence attempts in the future.

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In a letter to the US House Judiciary Committee sent on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg describes how high-ranking government officials tried to pressure Meta to censor certain posts about Covid-19 – including humor and satire.

He also notes that the White House expressed “great frustration” when the company resisted these attempts, reports Politico.

“I believe the government's pressure was misguided, and I regret that we were not more open about our opposition to this,” writes Zuckerberg and continues:

“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government, regardless of orientation – and we stand ready to resist if anything like this happens again.”

The Meta boss also expresses remorse over how Meta handled content related to New York Post reporting on Hunter Biden in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. The FBI had warned at the time that the information, which was true, could be part of a “Russian disinformation campaign,” prompting Meta to throttle the spread of the disclosure.

“It has since become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have suppressed the story,” writes Mark Zuckerberg.

Republican Jim Jordan from Ohio hails the letter as a “major victory for free speech” in a series of posts on X.

The White House defends its handling of covid-19 information in a statement.

“When we were faced with a deadly pandemic encouraged this administration to take responsible action to protect public health and safety,” the US government wrote in a statement.