Meta Platforms CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has accused senior officials from the Joe Biden Administration of pressuring his company to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire, in 2021.

In a statement on Monday addressed to Jim Jordan Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Jerrold Nadler, the committee’s Ranking Member, Zuckerberg revealed that his teams faced repeated demands from the White House to remove specific contents from Meta’s platforms.

Zuckerberg stated that while Meta made its own decisions regarding content removal, the pressure exerted by the government was inappropriate.

I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,

Zuckerberg noted.

He emphasised Meta’s commitment to maintaining its content standards without yielding to political pressure and expressed a willingness to resist similar efforts in the future.

The Meta CEO also recounted an incident in which the FBI warned the company about a potential Russian disinformation campaign involving the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election.

When the New York Post published a story alleging corruption within the Biden family, Meta temporarily demoted the story while awaiting fact-checker verification. Zuckerberg admitted this action was a mistake, stating,

In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.

In addition to addressing content moderation, Zuckerberg discussed the contributions he made during the last presidential election cycle through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

These funds were aimed at supporting local election jurisdictions to ensure safe voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the non-partisan intent of these contributions, Zuckerberg acknowledged that some perceived them as favoring one political party over another. He declared his intention to remain neutral in future elections, stating,

I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

The statement reads,

I appreciate the Committee’s interest in content moderation on online platforms. As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation, I welcome the opportunity to share what I’ve taken away from this process.

There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our platforms are for everyone we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.

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. 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. 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 due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.