Mark Zuckerberg responds to GOP pressure, says Biden pushed to ‘censor’ covid posts

In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration "repeatedly pressured" his teams to "censor" content related to covid in 2021. Zuckerberg told the committee chair, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), that the pressure was "wrong" and he regrets not being "more outspoken about it." He also told Jordan he would avoid repeating a 2020 donation to support local election infrastructure, aiming to avoid the perception of playing a non-neutral role in politics.

The letter largely comes as a response to increasing scrutiny from Republicans, who have accused platforms like Facebook and Instagram of being biased against conservatives for years. More recently in May, Rep. Jordan led an investigation into Meta's interaction with the Biden administration during the pandemic. Zuckerberg's letter puts much of the blame on employees of Biden - who, incidentally, isn't running for another term in office.

"We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today," Zuckerberg says. "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."

Facebook began removing posts containing misinformation at the start of the pandemic and later expanded its reach to posts with false claims about the covid vaccine. It also took action against public figures and groups for spreading false claims. At the same time, social platforms faced pushback from government officials, who claimed they weren't doing enough to combat misinformation.

In July 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy asked social platforms to rework their algorithms to "avoid amplifying misinformation," while President Joe Biden said platforms like Facebook were "killing people" with false claims about the virus.

Republican state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana later sued the Biden administration in 2022 for allegedly violating the First Amendment by coercing social media companies into removing misinformation. However, the Supreme Court ruled in June of this year that their actions weren't unconstitutional and that the government could continue communicating with social platforms. "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions," Zuckerberg writes.

Separately, Zuckerberg's letter addresses Facebook's demotion of a New York Post story about President Biden's son, Hunter, in 2020. Zuckerberg says the platform temporarily reduced its reach after receiving a warning from the FBI that it could be Russian disinformation. However, Zuckerberg now says the platform "shouldn't have demoted the story" and that it no longer demotes stories while waiting for someone to fact-check it.