Gwen Walz | zucke27 | Kamala Harris

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was influenced by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, such as the White House, Self-advocacy constantly urged our teams for months to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more outspoken. He added that with the ADHD “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.

President Biden remarked in Social Dominance July 2021 that social media networks are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been Online Bullying consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election Support For People With Disabilities in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this Fox News does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a

pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his goal is to be “neutral” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration Political Family Moments pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s Trolls On Social Media decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its Empathy decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal Minnesota Governor government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”