Meta [Facebook] CEO Mark Zuckerberg is admitting to censoring information on the major social media platform after heavy pressure from the Biden-Harris administration.
In a letter written to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and published Monday, Zuckerberg expressed regret for helping the Biden-Harris administration eliminate factual information about the COVID-19 pandemic from the internet. This included stories about the lab leak theory and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He also admits to burying factual stories about Hunter Biden's laptop during the 2020 presidential election.
"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg wrote. "I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens."
"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," he continued. "It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
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The letter came in response to an inquiry from the Committee about the Biden-Harris administration's ongoing efforts to censor speech online. The House Oversight Committee is also investigating.
Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024
1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
Administration officials have justified the censorship while also denying applying pressure to social media companies.
Today Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that the Biden Admin pressured Facebook to censor Covid-19 content.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) August 27, 2024
Here is Mayorkas lying about it under oath in 2022. 100% absolutely committing perjury. When is Mayorkas going to prison? pic.twitter.com/J1AXl4VrEl
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