In a series of stunning admissions, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans’ posts, including “humor and satire” – and Facebook did so.
Zuckerberg also confessed that Facebook suppressed a story about Hunter and Joe Biden’s alleged corruption before the 2020 election after being contacted by the FBI, and he asserted that he’s not going to fund “election infrastructure” anymore – spending which has been dubbed “Zuckerbucks” and much-criticized by conservatives.
Zuckerberg wrote that he wished he had been more outspoken about the government pressure at the time, and he promised to do better.
However, despite Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook has still been censoring accurate information that hurts Democrats.
For example, in April, Facebook censored a Wisconsin Right Now news story that reported accurately that former President Donald Trump was leading President Joe Biden in a new CNN poll, including with women. Facebook falsely labeled the news story “spam” and “misleading.”
Facebook also briefly removed the entire page of Wisconsin conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna this summer.
The House Judiciary GOP wrote on X, “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.”
X CEO Elon Musk shared the Zuckerberg letter on X and wrote, “Sounds like a First Amendment violation.”
RFK Jr., who has joined forces with former President Donald Trump, wrote on X, “Thanks Elon for resisting the government censorship at enormous personal cost. In 1776, a generation of patriots put their fortunes and lives on the line to give us the Bill of Rights. You have put your fortune on the line to safeguard it. You were born in South Africa but you are a true American patriot.”
Zuckerberg’s letter, dated August 26, was addressed to Jim Jordan, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary.
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 wrote.
“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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he said.
“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. 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.
In a separate situation, Zuckerberg wrote, “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. 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.”
He noted: “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again – for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Zuckerberg also addressed “the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.” He stated that he intended them to “be non-partisan – spread across urban, rural and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. 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.”
A Biden spokesperson defended the administration’s censorship actions to Politico, saying they were “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present,” the Democrat administration told Politico.
