Credit where credit’s due: Mark Zuckerberg is acknowledging the truth of the role his social media giant played in censoring reasonable information and viewpoints regarding COVID-19, as well as the role President Joe Biden’s administration played in pressuring Meta to censor that information.
Granted, this comes three years after the censorship happened and effectively silenced discussion on the world’s largest social media platform, and neither Zuckerberg nor Meta will likely face any sort of repercussions for this admission.
And as for the Biden administration, don’t make me laugh.
The disclosure came in a Monday letter to House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as part of an inquiry into the content moderation on social media platforms in the run-up to and the aftermath of the 2020 elections.
“There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“Our platforms are for everyone — we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.”
This was an appropriately mealy-mouthed lead-in to the salient fact at play here: Namely, the most powerful elected government in the world had shared some very specific “concerns around public discourse and public safety” with Meta.
“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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
Will Kamala Harris lose?
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he continued. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Separately, Zuckerberg also admitted Meta oughtn’t have censored information regarding Hunter Biden’s toxic laptop, saying in the letter that he had done so because the FBI had warned them “about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
“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,” he wrote.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote, adding that Meta’s platforms “no longer temporarily demotes things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
1. Biden-Harris Admin “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024
As timely apologies go, this ranks right up there with, say, RFK Jr. hypothetically deciding to belatedly apologize on his uncle’s behalf for those unfortunate goings-on at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Sorry ’bout that!
While, yes, the time period in question is far shorter, the impact on American public discourse was also far greater. Pew Research reported in 2024 that 68 percent of Americans used Facebook and 47 percent used Instagram, Meta’s two biggest platforms in the United States.
For one-to-many digital communications, the platforms have long overtaken email and other digital social networks as an outlet for speech.
Zuckerberg is, in effect, admitting that, yes, the U.S. government told his company what Americans could say, full stop. And let’s not dance around with the fact that these were suggestions and pressure campaigns as opposed to edicts; one need only look at the war authorities are beginning to wage against Elon Musk for not bowing to this “voluntary” pressure to guess what would have happened to Zuckerberg had Meta not followed through on what the federal government wanted.
The only real upside to this is that, while this sort of thing kept the Biden campaign and administration’s factual prestidigitations alive for longer than they should have been, this may end up sinking Kamala Harris’ campaign, at least in its attempts to control the narrative.
After all, unsavory or unpopular information is going to be a lot harder to suppress via nudging pressure if Zuckerberg and Musk are completely upfront about it. If anything, it’ll be a case of the Streisand effect: The pressure will only draw attention to the adversarial information.
It may be cold comfort for those who were right about COVID-19 and the provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop but were shut up by big tech. However, one can hope that Zuckerberg’s admission makes it harder for this stunt to be pulled off again.
