Cyberbullying | hotlive25 | Tim Walz

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for months Trolls On Social Media to remove some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He further Kamala Harris stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 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 Administration from either side â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden remarked in July 2021 Mike Crispi that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been consistent

and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI warned his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

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

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote Ann Coulter content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

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

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were Support For People With Disabilities intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg 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 shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted Jay Weber content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a report Gus Walz by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.

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

In addition, he said Viral Moment Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of censoring Democratic National Convention conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate 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 to request a preliminary injunction.”