Zuckerberg admits Biden admin pressured Facebook to censor COVID content, says it was wrong to suppress The Post’s Hunter laptop coverage
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content and acknowledged it was wrong to stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.
The content the Biden administration requested that Meta take down included “humor and satire,” according to the Facebook founder, and he said he regrets complying with certain demands.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg, 40, vowed that things will be different in future should the government make similar requests.
“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,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg separately added that suppressing The Post’s exclusive report on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop ahead of the 2020 election was a mistake.
He explained to the House Judiciary Committee, which has been probing Facebook’s content moderation standards, that prior to the decision to limit sharing of the bombshell October 2020 story, the FBI had “warned” Meta about “a potential Russian disinformation operation” related to the Biden family and Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board of directors.
“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Zuckerberg wrote .
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,”
he acknowledged. Zuckerberg assured Jordan that Meta has put policies in place to ensure that similar censorship of stories “doesn’t happen again.”
“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the US while waiting for fact-checkers,” the billionaire tech entrepreneur claimed.
Zuckerberg’s letter to Jordan is a far stronger admission that mistakes were made in the way his company handled The Post’s laptop exposé than the tech titan’s 2022 concession on Joe Rogan’s podcast , where he said “it sucks” that the story was suppressed when it was not in fact Russian disinformation.
“It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks,” the Meta CEO told Rogan.
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The government pressuring media to suppress inconvenient facts at election time is what an actual threat to democracy looks like.
If Harris is elected, we can expect more of these Soviet style attacks on our freedoms.
Look how happy her voters are that she, or her running mate, don't bother to answer questions from anyone. They've already embraced it.
Doesn't say that. Government may have pressured him to suppress false claims and unsupported fear mongering.
Willful ignorance
Yet you are either unwilling or unable to prove me wrong.
Just read the article, it proves you wrong.
I read the article and NO WHERE does it say the Biden administration or the FBI pressured Facebook to censor the stories on supposed Biden family corruption or Hunter Bidens laptop. It does say that they pressured Facebook to censor misinformation about Covid, the rest were actions taken by Facebook after simply being warned of the very real Russian disinformation campaign.
" the FBI had “warned” Meta about “a potential Russian disinformation operation”
We know for a fact that there was a Russian disinformation campaign so the FBI rightly warned Facebook of it.
New Evidence Shows How Russia’s Election Interference Has Gotten More Brazen | Brennan Center for Justice
Russia used Trump allies to influence 2020 election with goal of ‘denigrating’ Biden, US intelligence report says | CNN Politics
US intelligence report alleging Russia election interference shared with 100 countries | Reuters
It's funny how some completely misread these stories but shows that many will only see what they desperately want to see and ignore the actual facts in favor of some fantasy conspiracy theory that seems on the surface to support their hilariously flawed ideological views.
Unable ...
No it doesn't. It is empty, unsupported and unspecified claims.
The government under Biden /Harris.
And all this time we were told by Democrats and the left that this never happened.
Pretty much every time they dismiss something as a conspiracy theory, it turns out to be true.
Funny how that happens isn't it.
We've known for years that the FBI had warned many media companies of the very real Russian disinformation campaign. The only thing this article adds is that Zuckerberg is claiming they were pressured to “censor” content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. That's it. No where does the article claim the Biden administration pressured Facebook to "censor" any stories or articles regarding the supposed Biden family corruption or Hunters laptop which is of course what every conservative Trump supporter here seems to be claiming which is really quite funny but sad to watch.
It has been thought that perhaps the FBI was eager to 'get in front' of the Hunter Biden laptop story they knew was coming.
There certainly has never been even a shred of proof of anything surrounding the laptop story was ever Russian disinformation.
Censored by the media to help a candidate.
"It has been thought" "People are saying" "Some are saying" "Many people think"
Ah yes, the last refuge of those who want to make a claim to support their beliefs but have exactly ZERO evidence of anything even remotely close to a fact.
Please do point out where in the article that Zuckerberg claims that the FBI or the Biden administration told them the laptop story was Russian disinformation.
Sure--as soon as you quote me claiming it did.
And what does that have to do with telling everybody it didn't happen? The Biden administration violated the 1st amendment and you're willing to give them a pass.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." - 1st Amendment
When exactly did congress or even the Biden administration make a law prohibiting the freedom of the press? "Pressuring" Facebook to self-regulate potentially deadly misinformation about Covid doesn't even come close to violating the 1st amendment.
"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?" - Donald J Trump
That suggestion from the Flabby Fuhrer comes a lot closer to violating the 1st amendment than anything the Biden administration has ever done or suggested. All they did was discourage Facebook from sharing "fake news" about Covid, they didn't threaten to revoke their licensing.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content and acknowledged it was wrong to stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
Yet trump is a threat to democracy S/
A progressive did some soul searching. I think he also promised not to interfere in any more elections.
They were clearly right to do so as peddling in misinformation about a deadly virus put American lives at risk. The story clearly does not claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to "stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop" which would have been wrong but didn't happen and isn't what this article or Zuckerberg claimed.
His post clearly stated the same, perhaps you merely overlooked it.
But the story was censored by someone to someone's specific benefit.
Ah ha! So, someone did something to someone's benefit... Let's blame Biden! Or better yet, the "Deep State"! Yeah, that's it!
The article makes it clear Facebook/Meta was being extra cautious and decided to "temporarily demote" (notice that was not "catch and kill" like Trump and his campaign did with unfavorable stories about Trump) some stories that didn't have any actual evidence backing them up but also couldn't be disproved and so they sent them to their fact checkers for corroboration.
“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” - Mark Zuckerberg
I think that's a statement most of us could make about a thousand different choices we make every day, with the benefit of hindsight and new information we might make different choices. That's not some revelation, that's just common sense. There's no conspiracy here, but don't try telling the Trumpites that, if there's no conspiracies what else would they do to fill their with and how would they be able to blame everything wrong in their lives on their most hated enemies, the scary boogie man of liberals, progressives and Democrats.
Or we can go skipping merrily along, believing in a series of remarkable coincidences.