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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was pressured by the Biden administration in 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for Emotional Moment an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that Alec Lace with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

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

Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been clear and Ann Coulter consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Acceptance Speech he said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will

not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

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

Zuckerberg Mike Crispi said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American Kamala Harris content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the Children With Disabilities 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 company and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he Fox News stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community 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 plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of Hope Walz suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near 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 seek a preliminary injunction.”