An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that 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 feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – 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 actions to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account 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 further noted in the letter that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.
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 updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated 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 said his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, 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 perception has gained a firm foothold 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 attempted to close the gap between his social media company and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff 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 of whom are contractors, are globally located 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 victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices 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 request a preliminary injunction.”
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