An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was urged by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the letter that the FBI warned his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “neutral” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, 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, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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