In a letter to U.S. Congressman Jim Jordan, the founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that the Biden administration and the FBI pressured the platform into shutting down free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
Zuckerberg said it was wrong for the federal government to pressure social media organizations during the pandemic and for the FBI to pressure them to silence credible allegations of corruption against the Biden family in the lead-up to the last presidential election.
The letter comes days after the CTV interrupted a broadcast of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech, calling him a conspiracy theorist while he was saying the government pressured media companies to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has joined the ranks of the crazed conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor dissent during Covid,” Kennedy posted on X.
Zuckerberg said he was taking responsibility for what they decided to censor but that those decisions were made amid pressure from government agencies.
“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 humour and satire and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said in the letter. “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.”
True North contacted Meta to ask if the Canadian government similarly attempted to pressure Meta into shutting down posts that it deemed misinformation but did not receive a response.
“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,” Zuckerberg said. “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.”
The letter explains how the FBI “warned” Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation involving the Biden family taking bribes from Chinese officials and a Ukrainian firm, Burisma, in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
A survey from the American-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics found that 78% of those asked believed that “access to the correct information could have been critical to their decision at the polls.”
Zuckerberg said that after receiving pressure from the FBI and seeing the New York Post report on the corruption allegations against the Biden family, Meta demoted the story on Facebook. At the same time, its fact-checkers worked to verify it.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
True North could not verify with Meta if this policy would extend beyond the U.S. before publishing.