Public Display Of Affection | zucke27 | Fox News

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, Empathy repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Emotional Moment Instagram, was not more outspoken. He added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” Self-advocacy Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures Social Dominance to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Viral Video the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since updated its policies and

procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe MAGA Supporters voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that Chasten Buttigieg the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically Mike Crispi examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow Cyberbullying political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in Gus Walz a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing Tim Walz to request a preliminary injunction.”