Mark Zuckerberg Admits To Congress: Biden Administration Pressured Us To Censor Covid-19 Content

Mark Zuckerberg has admitted in a formal letter to the US Congress that the government pressured the social media platforms to implement censorship during the Covid crisis and he regrets that.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Meta, the company owing Facebook and Instagram, admitted in a letter to the US House Judiciary Committee. He said officials also expressed much frustration when Meta sometimes did not agree to censorship. While Zuckerberg says in the letter that the final decision to take down a particular post or change the general rules for posts on Covid-19 was theirs, the decision was made in a situation where they were under pressure from the government. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to House Judiciary Committee. Source: X.

As we have written before, Zuckerberg admitted to such censorship already last year, but the current statement is important because it is an official letter to the Congressional Judiciary Committee.

In essence, during the Covid crisis, it was not only information that was somehow wrong that was removed from the platforms as 'misinformation'. Instead, the spread of true information that for some reason the authorities did not like was also limited regularly, and removed. The 'misinfo' about Covid was tackled already in early 2020, and in April of the same year, it was announced that Facebook was working with more than 60 fact-checking organisations in more than 50 languages. On the basis of what was being presented as the truth by the health authorities at the time, fact-checkers reviewed posts that appeared "suspicious" and flagged them as misinformation or removed them from the platform. The removal included, in Facebook's explanation, "harmful claims", including the really dangerous ones – suggestions to drink bleach to fight the virus – as well as merely controversial claims, such as seeing social distancing ineffective in limiting the spread of the virus.

In December 2020, Facebook banned posts questioning the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. In February 2021, after "following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization", the point was amended further – you could not post claims that:

• COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured

• Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against

• It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine

• Vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism

At the end of May 2021, Facebook re-allowed posts about Covid-19 being possibly of anthropogenic origin, i.e. leaked from a laboratory.

Perhaps all in all, in the case of Covid, a fairly wide range of topics went under the heading of "misinformation", and the decision to flag or remove them was taken not only by the platform's partner fact-checkers but by the officials involved. All this led to utterly absurd forms of censorship. For example, when journalist John Tierney wrote in April 2021 about the damage the school closures and imposition of masks caused on children's mental and physical health, with references even to scientifically proven damage, Facebook tagged the article as "Partly False Information". The protest was ignored by the platform.

In August 2021, Zuckerberg said Facebook had removed 18 million posts that contained "Covid misinformation".

This is how Facebook informs you if you post something they/the government does not like. Photo: screenshot.

Factual information about Covid-19 and the pandemic is not, of course, the only thing that social media companies have prevented from spreading. In October 2020, the same happened with a New York Post article based on emails and documents found on President Biden's son Hunter Biden's laptop, linking the then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to influence peddling towards Ukraine and China. At the time, the whole story was declared a Russian disinformation operation, but other publications have since acknowledged the veracity of the information. The so-called Twitter files revealed that the security authorities had been pre-processing social media companies for a long time, informing them that a "hack and leak operation" by a foreign country on Hunter Biden was about to take place and advising them to limit its spread. Twitter did not even allow a link to the article to be posted. Facebook did, but similarly restricted its distribution. Zuckerberg later admitted on Joe Rogan's show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had come to them to proactively inform them about the Hunter Biden laptop story. We have written about the Twitter files and the Hunter Biden laptop story at our site here.

In his letter, Zuckerberg also addressed the need to limit the spread of the laptop story and reiterated that they were warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the so-called disinformation operation involving the Biden family. “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg now admits, adding that the company has taken steps to ensure that such things do not happen again. “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we're ready to push back if something like this happens,” Zuckerberg writes.