Gwen Walz | zucke27 | Alec Lace

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the White House, Children With Disabilities repeatedly pressured our teams for months to remove some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Hope Walz Instagram, was not more outspoken. He added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year 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 â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens Special Education again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

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

Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A spokesperson from the White House responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time Tim Walz was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the communication that the FBI warned his company about Social Media Criticism possible 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 alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since Kamala Harris 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 stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to help people vote Minnesota Governor safely during a pandemic,” said 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 he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “has admitted that Jay Weber the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically

scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, Mike Crispi 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 win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative Free Menstrual Products content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “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.”