Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said he is bowing to what he says is pressure from the US government to censor Facebook and Instagram posts about Covid during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration had “repeatedly pressured” Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta to “censor some Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.
“In 2021, senior officials in the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration to our teams when we disagreed,” he told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. “I believe the government’s pressure is misplaced,” he said in a letter to Jim Jordan.
During the pandemic, it added misinformation alerts when users commented on or liked posts found to contain misinformation about Covid.
The company also deleted posts criticizing Covid vaccines, and the virus was created in a Chinese lab.
During the 2020 US presidential campaign, Biden accused social media sites like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be published on its platform.
“With the benefit of hindsight and new information, I think we made some choices that we wouldn’t have made today,” Zuckerberg said. “I regret that we didn’t talk about it more.
“As I told our teams then, I feel strongly that no administration push in any direction should compromise our content standards. And if this happens again, we are ready to back down,” he said.
Zuckerberg also said Facebook “temporarily took down” a story about the content of a laptop belonging to the president’s son Hunter Biden after the FBI warned that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against Biden.
Zuckerberg wrote that it was clear the story was not misinformation and that “in hindsight, we shouldn’t have taken the story down.”
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee called Zuckerberg’s approval a “major victory for free speech.” Post on the group’s Facebook page.
The White House defended its actions during the pandemic, saying it encouraged “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position remains clear and consistent,” it said. “We believe that technology companies and other private actors must take into account the effects of their actions on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they provide.”
