This week Mark Zuckerberg I sent a letter Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has been on a crusade for months to prove that Meta, through its Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by removing right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents and the committee interviewed several employees, but failed to find any smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his opinion on the matter, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa in which he seems to indicate that there was some truth to the GOP conspiracy theory.
Specifically, he said that in 2021 the Biden administration asked Meta to “censor some Covid-related content.” Meta removed the posts, and Zuckerberg now regrets the decision. He also admitted that it was wrong to remove some content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the company did after the FBI warned that the reports could be Russian disinformation.
What struck me, aside from the mocking tone of the letter, was how Zuckerberg used the word “censor.” For years, the right has been using that word to describe what it sees as Facebook’s systematic suppression of conservative posts. Some state attorneys general have even used that trope to argue that the company’s content should be regulated, and Florida and Texas have passed laws to do just that. Facebook has long maintained that the First Amendment is about government suppression, and by definition its decisions about content could not be characterized as such. In fact, the Supreme Court dismissed the claims and blocked the laws.
Now, in using that term to describe the removal of Covid material, Zuckerberg appears to be backpedaling. After years of insisting that, rightly or wrongly, a social media company’s content decisions did not deprive people of First Amendment rights, and in fact saying that in making those decisions, the company was invoking Your right to free speech: Zuckerberg is now giving his conservative critics exactly what they wanted.
I asked Meta spokesman Andy Stone whether the company now agrees with the GOP that some of its decisions to remove content can be characterized as “censorship.” Stone said Zuckerberg was referring to the government when he used that term. But he also pointed me to Zuckerberg’s assertion that the final decision to remove the posts was Meta’s. (In response to Zuckerberg’s letter, the White House said, “When faced with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” leaving the final decision up to Facebook.)
Meta can’t have it both ways. The letter is clear: Zuckerberg said the government pressured Meta to “censor” some COVID content. Meta removed that material. Meta therefore now characterizes some of its own actions as censorship. Seizing on this, Republican members of the Judiciary Committee quickly tweeted that Zuckerberg has now openly admitted “Facebook censored Americans.”
Stone said Meta does not yet consider himself a censor. So is Meta questioning that GOP tweet? Stone declined to comment on the matter. It appears Meta will not offer any response as long as Republican lawmakers and right-wing commentators boast that Facebook now admits it blatantly censored conservatives as a matter of policy.
The Meta CEO gave Jordan and the Republican Party another gift in his letter, which involves his private philanthropy. During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg helped Funding non-partisan initiatives to protect people’s right to vote. Republicans criticized Zuckerberg’s effort to help Democrats. Zuckerberg continues to insist that he wasn’t advocating that people vote a certain way, just making sure they were free to cast their ballots. But, he wrote to Jordan, he acknowledged that some people didn’t believe him. So, apparently to please those misinformed or ill-intentioned critics, he’s now promising not to fund bipartisan voting efforts during this election cycle. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or the other, or even appear to play a role,” he wrote.
