Gwen Walz | hotlive25 | Vice Presidential Nominee

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was influenced by the Biden administration in 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for Fox News months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg further stated Anxiety that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden Parent-child Relationship remarked in July of 2021 that social media networks are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public Democratic National Convention health.”

“Our stance 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 their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI warned his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Alec Lace the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies Political Family Moments and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

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

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just Social Media Criticism admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers Social Dominance have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias Self-advocacy does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he stated 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, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a Chasten Buttigieg case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to

seek a preliminary injunction.”