On Monday (26th August), Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg exposed how the Biden administration weaponised political censorship to curtail free speech on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
He revealed that the US government, prodded by the White House, interfered in the content moderation process of Meta and coerced the management to censor ‘certain’ Covid-19 related information.
In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Zuckerberg stated, “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.”
“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,” he pointed out.
The Meta founder admitted that the company made ‘some decisions’ owing to the intimidation of the Biden administration, which it should not have enforced in hindsight.
“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,” Mark Zuckerberg emphasised.
Russian disinformation hoax, Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden administration
He informed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reached out to Meta to censor content related to ‘Russian disinformation’ targeting the Biden family in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential elections.
In December 2022, OpIndia reported based on ‘Twitter Files’ about the interference of security agencies in the functioning of Twitter and repeated directives for content removal.
Mark Zuckerberg also made references to the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was gutted by both Facebook and Twitter.
“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,” he admitted.
In its report, the New York Post alleged that they had accessed material from a damaged Macbook that was brought to a service centre for repair. The customer who brought the laptop never collected or paid for the services.
The shop owner said he repeatedly tried to contact the client. Though he could not identify the owner as Hunter Biden, he said the laptop had Beau Biden Foundation’s sticker.
The report has several documents and mentions a video that proves that Joe Biden met a high-profile businessman from Ukraine when he was Vice President of the United States.
Reports suggested that Biden may have helped his son Hunter, using his influence as the VP of the United States, in his business in Ukraine. The Biden Camp categorically denied all the allegations.
Meta’s fightback against governmental censorship
Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that his company has made several policy changes to restrict governmental interference in content moderation decisions and prevent the arbitrary classification of controversial posts on its platforms as ‘Russian disinformation.’
“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 for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S.
while waiting for fact-checkers,” he added.
The Meta founder concluded, “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.”
