Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed that the White House under President Joe Biden pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic around 2021.
In a letter dated August 26, 2024, and addressed to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he regretted caving in to the pressure, admitting that he removed certain content on the request of White House officials.
In the letter, Zuckerberg revealed that such content, especially regarding COVID-19 and the SARS COV-2 vaccines, which was typically labeled “misinformation” often turned out to be factual.
It will be recalled that during the pandemic in 2020/2021, Senior White House officials such as former Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy criticized Facebook for not doing enough to take down misinformation about COVID-19. President Biden also accused social media platforms like Facebook of “killing people” for allowing misinformation about the virus.
Zuckerberg said in the letter that Meta will not bow to such pressure again in the future. An excerpt from the letter reads,
“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.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
The White House, in its reaction, claimed that the Biden administration took “necessary actions” to protect public health and safety during the pandemic.
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