Zuckerberg Says Biden Admin 'Pressured' To 'Censor' COVID Content

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said President Joe Biden's administration "pressured" Facebook to "censor" COVID-19 content in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the New York Post reports.

Zuckerberg, 40, claimed that "senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to "censor" content related to the COVID-19 pandemic as it was unfolding in 2021, making requests to take down content that included "humor and satire." The Facebook co-founder said he regrets complying with certain demands made by the administration in the letter.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote via the New York Post. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg claimed he would make different decisions when facing similar requests in the future.

“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 also claimed that suppressing the New York Post's exclusive report on Hunter Biden's laptop prior to his father's 2020 presidential election victory was a mistake. The Meta CEO claimed the FBI "warned" the company about "a potential Russian disinformation operation" in relation to the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company in which Hunter served on the board of directors, prior to limiting the sharing of the story.

“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.