Zuckerberg Admits Biden Admin Asked Facebook to Censor COVID Content, Says It Was Wrong to Suppress The Post's Hunter Laptop Coverage

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that it caved to pressure from the Biden administration to censor COVID-19 content — and that the fusillade was wrong that stifled The Post's coverage of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.

In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg wrote that "senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured" Meta to "censor" coronavirus pandemic content in 2021.

Among the content demanded for takedowns by the Biden administration were those in the category of 'humor and satire,' said the Facebook founder, who claimed to have regret over some of the demands acceded to. 

 

I feel that the government pressure was misguided, and wish we had been more vocal about it," he wrote. "I also think we made some decisions that, knowing what we do today with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't do now.

Mr. Mark Zuckerberg

"I told our teams I felt strongly that we should not change our content policies because of the President's statement I did not make any changes to the content policy after that conversation," he wrote.

Zuckerberg said that, separately, he thought it had been a mistake to suppress the New York Post's exclusive reporting about emails said to be from Hunter Biden's laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.

He also told the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating Facebook's standards in moderating content, that before making the decision to limit sharing on its platform of the bombshell October 2020 story, the FBI had "warned" Meta about "a potential Russian disinformation operation" about the Biden family and Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board of directors. 

 

"That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply," Zuckerberg wrote. 

"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," he acknowledged.

Zuckerberg assured Jordan that similar censorship of stories "doesn't happen again," something Meta has put policies to ensure of.

Policy Change:

 

"We've updated our policies and processes to prevent this from happening again-once for instance, we no longer temporarily remove things from the US while waiting for fact-checkers," the billionaire tech entrepreneur claimed.

This is a far stronger admission of mistakes made in the way his company handled The Post's laptop exposé than even the tech titan's 2022 concession on Joe Rogan's podcast, where he said, "it sucks" that the story was suppressed when it was not, in fact, Russian disinformation.

"It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks," the Meta CEO told Rogan.

"I think the process was pretty reasonable," he added, still defending the censorship effort. "A lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case."

A Post report on Hunter's abandoned laptop revealed there were tens of thousands of emails between the president's son and business associates, outlining how the first son used his political access to advance his overseas business interests.

Zuckerberg also said he doesn't plan on spending another $400 million-plus to help finance local elections this cycle after the so-called "Zuckerbucks" initiative was roundly criticized by Republicans as an attempt to influence the 2020 vote.

"They were designed to be nonpartisan - spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities," he said in an explanation of his motives. "Still, despite the analyses that I have seen showing otherwise, I know that some believe this work benefited one party over the other.

"My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another-or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle."