Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Monday that Biden administration officials pressured Facebook into censoring Covid-related content and conceded that his platform was mistaken when it censored the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election.
In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), Zuckerberg owned up to Facebook’s decision to go along with the White House’s censorship demands and expressed regret for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he added. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Documents produced during the Murthy v. Missouri litigation and the Judiciary Committee’s online censorship investigation appear to show Facebook’s initial resistance to censorship demands from Biden administration officials, but the platform eventually caved once the pressure became more pronounced. Facebook is prepared to resist future attempts by government officials to pressure the platform into making certain decisions about content moderation, Zuckerberg asserted.
Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the FBI alerted Facebook to the possibility of Russian disinformation spreading about the Biden family and Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. With that in mind, Facebook suppressed the New York Post’s reporting on emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop while it waited for fact-checkers to assess the validity of the story.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg conceded. His comments echo those he made on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast two years ago about why Facebook censored the Post’s reporting.
Internal documents known as the “Twitter Files” showed that a similar process took place at Twitter when the platform suppressed the laptop story and the Post’s account for supposedly violating its hacked-materials policy. Elon Musk provided those internal documents to a group of independent journalists when he purchases the platform and fired its top executives. He has since rebranded the platform X and changed how it functions to promote free speech.
Federal prosecutors introduced Hunter Biden’s laptop at his criminal gun trial in June. Veteran FBI agent Erica Jensen testified to the validity of the laptop data and explained how investigators verified its contents by cross-referencing its serial number with Biden’s Apple iCloud backup servers. Before the gun trial, numerous news organizations independently verified the laptop materials.
The emails on Biden’s laptop showed he he leveraged his family’s political connections to make millions off foreign business deals. House Republicans have uncovered $27 million in payments to Hunter Biden and his business partners from individuals and entities in Ukraine, China, Romania, and elsewhere. Those business dealings will likely come up at Hunter Biden’s criminal tax-evasion trial starting next week. Biden has pleaded not guilty to the nine criminal tax charges against him over his alleged failure to pay more than $1.4 million worth of taxes in a timely manner.
Beyond the content moderation changes, Zuckerberg said he is not going to fund election infrastructure this cycle after Republicans harshly criticized the partisan nature of his donations in 2020.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” Zuckerberg said.
