After years of conflict with the Biden administration over vaccine misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has accused the White House of “repeatedly” pressuring Facebook to “censor certain COVID-19 content” in 2021 that Facebook allegedly would not have removed without such pressure.
In a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Monday, the Meta CEO claimed that senior officials from the Biden administration “expressed a lot of frustration” when Facebook pushed back on certain content removal requests. According to Zuckerberg, the Biden administration not only sought to eliminate misinformation, but also “humor and satire.”
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote, taking accountability for his platform’s actions.
Nevertheless, Zuckerberg asserted that if Facebook were put in the same situation again by any presidential administration, the platform is now “ready to push back” and resist compromising its content standards. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg’s letter stated, while also admitting to demoting the Hunter Biden laptop story and changing Facebook’s policies to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
In a statement reported by The Seattle Times, the White House seemed equally ready to continue pushing back on Zuckerberg’s allegations that Facebook’s content removals were coerced. “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” the White House stated. “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.”
Conservatives, who have accused Meta of censoring right-leaning views, regarded Zuckerberg’s letter as a “big win for free speech.” They have even fought for an injunction to stop the Biden administration from contacting platforms like Facebook and allegedly pressuring them to remove content that Democrats view unfavorably. However, the Supreme Court in June dismissed claims that the Biden administration had coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that, because Facebook “began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content” before the government’s alleged pressure campaign, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore the responsibility for the posts being taken down.
In 2021, Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook had committed early on to removing COVID-19 misinformation, ramping up content takedowns as the pandemic began, The New York Times reported. After more than one year into the pandemic, Facebook had removed over 20 million pieces of content that violated its ever-tightening COVID-19 policies, Bloomberg reported.