Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has criticized the Biden administration for pressuring Facebook to censor content during the coronavirus pandemic, signaling that the company will reject any similar demands in the future. In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg expressed regret over the situation, stating that senior Biden officials, including those from the White House, had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” and showed frustration when Facebook did not comply.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook’s aim at the time was to encourage the public to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Zuckerberg said that he believed the pressure from the administration “was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” He said that the company had “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” and that “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.”
A Meta spokesman said the letter speaks for itself. A White House spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House has previously said that its discussions with social-media companies were aimed at promoting the adoption of vaccines and other public-health goals. Administration officials feared at the time that many Americans were hesitant to get vaccines because of false information they saw on Facebook.
Jordan has been targeting tech giants in general and Zuckerberg in particular over what he alleges is censoring of conservative views. Last year, he threatened a vote on holding Zuckerberg in contempt over failing to turn over internal company documents. That document request was connected to decisions by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, over when and whether to ban accounts or suppress posts.
Republicans had alleged that the company’s content-moderation decisions effectively censored information that was meaningful to Republicans.
The statement may be another piece of evidence that Zuckerberg has turned over a new leaf. The Facebook founder’s recent comments about Trump’s assassination attempt raised some eyebrows.
Democrats, on the other hand, have come to view censorship of social-media companies as a main tool to “defend democracy” and “stop hate,” two generic terms that when asked for more specifics about leads to blank stares.
Censoring social media and arresting owners of social media companies who refuse to do their bidding has become a go-to move on the left. Over the weekend, France arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov and one of the most prominent intelligence agents in the United States expressed hope that it could lead to the arrest of Elon Musk.
Alexander Vindman, the national security “expert” who helped impeach Donald Trump wrote about being happy about the crackdown and said that it was just the beginning because “there’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinformation and malign influence and a growing appetite for accountability. Mustk should be nervous.
“Of course,” The Daily Caller noted, “Vindman is just the id of the liberal establishment. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.
As Vindman notes in another tweet, France is ostensibly going after Durov for “all manner of criminal activity, including child porn” allegedly on the platform. But it’s obviously just a pretext. Durov refused to bow to Vladimir Putin and censor speech on his platform in Russia. He fled to the West thinking it’d be safe. But now the supposedly liberal West is doing what even Putin wouldn’t: they arrested him because he won’t silence dissenting voices.
So while Vindman himself is a two-bit toady, he’s right in the long-run. Durov’s Telegram is mostly a threat to the Russia-Ukraine narrative. While Western elites love waging a good foreign proxy war, this won’t ultimately hurt their bottom line. Musk’s Twitter, on the other hand, has the power to shape the narrative back in the West.
Twitter is an existential threat to the regime’s power across the West. And you can be they’re not finished with Elon Musk just yet.”
Musk recently endorsed Donald Trump for president, saying that he’s usually leaned to the left, but the chilling attacks against free speech by Democrats in their effort to consolidate power has given him little choice. News that the Tesla founder intended to interview Trump on Twitter led to one of the EU’s top ministers to threaten Musk with retaliation for promoting “misinformation.”
[Read More: Fauci Sent To The Hospital]
