Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was improper for the Biden administration to have pressured Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the coronavirus pandemic, vowing that the social-media giant would reject any such future efforts.
Zuckerberg also said he didn’t plan to repeat efforts to fund nonprofits to assist in state election efforts, a Covid-era push that had drawn Republican criticism and sparked many Republican-leaning states to ban the practice.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) that touched on a series of controversies, Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”…
Zuckerberg also made clear he didn’t plan to repeat heavy spending on election access. The billionaire Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonprofits to help conduct elections during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
While many localities said the money was a lifeline helping them register voters, set up socially-distanced voting booths and provide equipment to sort mail-in ballots, among other uses, Republicans said that the money, which they dubbed “Zuckerbucks,” unfairly benefited Democratic areas. More than two dozen mostly Republican-leaning states have now banned, limited or regulated the use of private funds to manage elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“Despite the analysis I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg wrote. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”….
In his letter to Jordan, Zuckerberg said that Meta “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Post story about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. The Post said at the time that its reporting was based on email exchanges between the two Bidens that were provided by allies of President Donald Trump, who in turn said they received them from a computer-repair person who found them on a laptop. At the time, dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter that then-candidate Biden cited in a presidential debate saying that the release of the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote.