Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has exposed Joe Biden’s administration as having “repeatedly pressured” social media bosses “for months” to censor content during the COVID pandemic.
Zuckerberg said in a letter to U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan that this included “humour and satire,” prompting satirical news site The Babylon Bee to suggest it has “grounds for a lawsuit.”
He claimed he now regrets having not been “more outspoken” in the face of government pressure and insisted: “We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
He added that when his team “didn’t agree” to censor posts, U.S. government officials “expressed a lot of frustration.”
British professor David Paton described this as a “remarkable admission,” adding:
Governments … were responsible for a huge amount of misinformation throughout the pandemic. At difficult times, it is even more essential we have independent voices and free information. More government censorship is not the answer.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage also highlighted that the claims show “we are not being told the truth about many things.”
The letter also acknowledges that Facebook was wrong to “demote” coverage of various controversies surrounding Joe Biden’s son, Hunter—particularly the stories on Hunter’s laptop and his Ukraine links by the New York Post. Zuckerberg previously told the Joe Rogan podcast “it sucks” that Facebook restricted a story about Hunter during the 2020 U.S. election when it was not Russian disinformation.
Yet it appears as though lessons are not being learnt. Instagram—another social media company owned by the Facebook parent company Meta—is currently under fire for banning accounts belonging to right-wing organisations or commentators. And in Britain, new Labour prime minister Sir Keir Starmer is using recent riots, triggered by the killing of three young girls in Southport, as a pretext to clamp down on the freedom of speech online.
Social media users would be well-advised not to hold their breath waiting to see whether Zuckerberg really is “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
