Tim Walz | zucke27 | Minnesota Governor

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was influenced by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly

pressured our teams for months to remove some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more Jay Weber vocal. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in Viral Moment the future, ” he wrote.

President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible Chasten Buttigieg measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further noted in the letter that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting Kamala Harris the 2020 election.

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make Online Bullying 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 avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during Acceptance Speech a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “neutral” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Ann Coulter Biden-Harris administration pressured 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 major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Self-advocacy Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media company and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into Fox News decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that 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 plaintiffs in a case Gwen Walz accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing Political Family Moments to request a preliminary injunction.”