An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.

An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was urged by the White House in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, 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 Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added 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 feel strongly that we should not compromise 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, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” 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 reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

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 “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 said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “neutral” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just 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 faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized 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 bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. 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 outsourced, are based worldwide 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, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate 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 seek a preliminary injunction.”
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