Mark Zuckerberg says Meta was ‘pressured’ by Biden administration to censor Covid-related content in 2021

Zuckerberg in his letter to the judiciary committee said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company was not more outspoken.

Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary committee on Monday that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden White House to censor some content around the Covid-19 pandemic. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said. In his letter to the judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information” there were decisions made in 2021 that wouldn’t be made today. “Like I said to our teams at the time, 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 said 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 said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious thread to public health.”