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Meta META+0.85% chief Mark Zuckerberg pointed the finger at the federal government for pushing the platform to censor pandemic-related content — and lamented not fighting back harder.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter addressed to Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.
The committee published the letter on its Facebook page and X account Monday.
Zuckerberg added that the government “expressed a lot of frustration” when the Facebook and Instagram parent disagreed with the administration. In the wake of the pressure, however, Meta took the content down — a decision Zuckerberg seemed to express regret over.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg said. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
If that situation were to happen again, Zuckerberg said the platform would be “ready to push back.”
From April through June 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines were beginning to be rolled out to the wider public, Meta said it removed 20 million posts from Facebook and Instagram globally for violating its policies on COVID-19-related misinformation. Meta has long been at the forefront of the battle against online disinformation, and publishes quarterly threat reports.
In response to the letter, the White House said in a statement to the Associated Press: “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
Experts have said it should not be up to social media platforms to call the shots on misinformation. Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security, has argued that such guidance should be developed by a national commission that “provides neutral, evidence-based guidance and recommendations in order to improve the health communication landscape.”