New Delhi:
In a letter to the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that the US administration under Joe Biden is “repeatedly pressuring” Meta to censor certain content on its platforms.
In the letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, Mr. Zuckerberg said the platform needed to make a number of changes, which “with the benefit of hindsight and new information” they will not be making today. He added that he regrets not having been “more vocal” about it.
“In 2021, senior officials in 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 significant frustration with our teams when we disagreed. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to remove content, and we are accountable for our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the administration’s pressure was misguided, and I regret that we were not more vocal about it,” the letter read.
Zuckerberg said he believed Meta should not compromise its content standards because of pressure from any government. “We're prepared to push back if something like this happens again,” he said.
Meta's CEO also addressed an FBI warning about a “potential Russian disinformation campaign targeting the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election.”
“When we saw an article in the New York Post that fall about corruption allegations involving the family of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, we sent that article to fact-checkers for review and temporarily downgraded it while we waited for a response. It has since become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have downgraded the article. We have changed our policies and processes to ensure that doesn’t happen again. For example, we no longer temporarily downgrade things in the US while we wait for fact-checkers,” he said.
Zuckerberg reiterated his support for electoral infrastructure ahead of the November presidential election. He spoke about his efforts to strengthen infrastructure in a nonpartisan manner. “I know some people believe that this work has benefited one party more than the other. My goal is to be neutral and not to play a role in any way or even appear to play a role. So I don't plan to make a similar contribution this cycle,” he said.
