An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time provoked ugly bullying attacks online.
An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time provoked ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was influenced by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. He further stated that with the “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 lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re ready to push back 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 comments, 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, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
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 “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, 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 impartially enforces its rules, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are globally located 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 decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury 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.”
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