Meta CEO says Biden administration urged censorship

Mark Zuckerberg on Monday told House Republicans that the Biden administration urged his company to suppress certain views on its platforms. Those included some statements about the COVID-19 pandemic and information about the Hunter Biden laptop story, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg’s letter to the House Judiciary Committee came after a barrage of correspondence from House Republicans over the past year. Those letters sought information about the Facebook and Instagram parent company’s alleged suppression of certain views on the pandemic or information about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

So Zuckerberg is saying the government censored social media content? Meta made its own decisions about how to manage the content on its platforms, Zuckerberg said. He added that Meta also took responsibility for those decisions. But he acknowledged that the company suppressed certain content only after the Biden administration urged it to do so.

So what exactly happened? The Biden administration urged Meta to suppress certain statements about the COVID-19 virus that it labeled as misinformation, Zuckerberg said. The company obliged. In hindsight, many of those statements turned out not to be misinformation, Zuckerberg said. He maintained that he would not censor them now, he regretted that his company did so in the past, and he vowed to make sure Meta pushed back on similar government pressure going forward.

Additionally, Zuckerberg said the Biden administration approached Meta before the 2020 election and said a Russian disinformation campaign was afoot to smear the Biden family about its connection to the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings. After that meeting, Zuckerberg saw a New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop and suppressed it while the company’s fact-checking department investigated the story’s allegations. The story turned out not to be Russian disinformation and the company should not have suppressed it, Zuckerberg said. Meta’s platforms have since changed their policies about such information, Zuckerberg said.

Dig deeper: Read Joseph Backholm’s column in WORLD Opinions about how the Biden administration admitted earlier this year it lied about the Hunter Biden laptop story.