The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has at the same time provoked ugly bullying attacks online.
The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave 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 pressured by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly 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 occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “causing harm” 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, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about potential 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 review the story.
Zuckerberg said 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 communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”
“The goal 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 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 posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, 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 Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and policymakers to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, 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 victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove 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 request a preliminary injunction.”
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