Empathy | zucke27 | Fox News

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was urged by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the White House, repeatedly pressured our Gwen Walz teams for an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, including satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. He

added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Tim Walz Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

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

A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public Viral Video health.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the 2020 Viral Moment election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and Gus Walz will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the Self-advocacy initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, Online Bullying and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Nonverbal Learning Disorder Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many Kamala Harris of whom are contractors, are based worldwide 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 of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices Ann Coulter on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”