“My goal is to be neutral and not play any role,” Mark Zuckerberg said. (File)
Washington:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes the US government’s push for his social media platforms to remove some Covid-19 content in 2021 was “wrong” and said he will oppose similar efforts in the future, according to a letter filed with a US congressional committee.
In the letter, addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and released by Republicans on the committee, Zuckerberg addressed a number of controversies surrounding content moderation on his platforms.
He also said he has no plans to renew funding for U.S. election infrastructure ahead of this year's presidential election, though the donations have been heavily criticized by Republicans.
Zuckerberg's submission to the committee on Monday comes just over two months before the US presidential election, which has seen a focus on widespread misinformation about the candidates on the internet.
Regarding the pandemic, the Facebook founder said that President Joe Biden's 2021 administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”
“I believe the government pressure was misguided and I regret that we were not more open about it,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“I am convinced that we should not neglect our substantive standards because of pressure from any government. And we are prepared to intervene if something like this happens again.”
Republicans saw the letter as a victory. The Republican House Judiciary Committee's account on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, called it a “major victory for free speech.”
The White House defended its handling of the pandemic, which has claimed more than a million lives in the United States, amid fierce political battles over vaccines and efforts to limit the spread of the virus.
“When we were faced with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible action to protect public health and safety,” a White House spokesman said Tuesday.
“We believe that technology companies and other private parties should consider the consequences of their actions.”
Zuckerberg said he would not repeat his Covid-era push to fund nonprofits that support U.S. election infrastructure, saying such donations are seen as partisan by Republicans.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play any role whatsoever or even appear to play a role,” he wrote.
The letter also addressed the controversy surrounding Facebook's handling of a story about Hunter, the son of US President Joe Biden, published by the New York Post in 2020.
Zuckerberg said the story, which allegedly exposed corrupt practices by the Biden family, had been “temporarily downgraded” while Facebook fact-checkers investigated the possibility that it was “a potential Russian disinformation campaign.”
Meta's CEO said the story ultimately did not belong to such an operation and that the platform has changed its policies so that posts in the United States will no longer be demoted while fact-checkers investigate them.
Republicans in Congress have taken aim at social media and tech companies in recent months, claiming they suppress or censor conservative views.
Donald Trump, who is seeking a return to power in November after losing his 2020 re-election battle to Biden, claimed that Zuckerberg's statement supported his conspiracy theory that the election was stolen.
“This is what everyone has been waiting for: THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published via a syndicated feed.)
