An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was influenced by the White House in 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire.
“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 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 prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said 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 promoting “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 communication 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 a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, 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 letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “election 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 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 posted 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 claimed Facebook and other large technology 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 sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide 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 claimants in a case accusing 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 seek a preliminary injunction.”
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