Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has said he regrets giving in to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.
“In 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed significant frustration with our teams when we did not agree,” she said in a letter to Jim Jordan, the head of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. “I believe the administration’s pressure was misplaced.”
During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation alerts to users when they commented on or liked posts deemed to contain false information about Covid.
The company also removed posts criticizing Covid vaccines and suggestions that the virus was developed in a Chinese lab.
During the 2020 US presidential election campaign, Biden accused social media platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on their platform.
“I think we made some decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg said. “I regret that we weren’t more forthcoming about that.”
“As I told our teams at the time, I firmly believe that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any administration in any direction. And we are ready to fight back if something like this happens again.”
Zuckerberg also said Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear the story was not disinformation and “in retrospect, we should not have downplayed it.”
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee called Zuckerberg’s admissions a “major victory for free speech” in a Post on the committee’s Facebook page.
The White House defended its actions during the pandemic, saying it encouraged “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent,” he said. “We believe that technology companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the information they present.”
