An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.
An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was urged by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, such as the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to remove some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “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, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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