Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that Facebook was “pressured” by the Biden administration to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic and regrets falling to those demands.

On Aug. 26, the tech billionaire sent a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, regarding concerns about content moderation on social media platforms in an ongoing investigation.

He claimed that senior officials from the Biden Administration “repeatedly pressured” the company to censor certain COVID-19 information “including humor and satire” in 2021. 

He said ultimately, it was the Meta team’s decision to censor content , but they made some choices that they wouldn’t have made today with the benefit of “hindsight and new information.”

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” 

He said, “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction.” 

Snippet of Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Jim Jordan. Source: House of Representatives Judiciary Committee

In the same letter, the Meta CEO also said he regretted demoting a story involving Russian disinformation and Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 while waiting for fact-checkers.

The platform faced scrutiny at the time over the censorship, and policies have since been changed to prevent a recurrence, he said. 

The letter garnered quite a reaction from decentralization and free-speech advocates on X. 

Director of Digital Asset Strategy at VanEck, Gabor Gubacs, shared the letter in a post on X, saying he was glad Zuckerberg made this public, adding: 

“Every official who illegally pressured media companies to censor their users should be named, investigated, and tried in court.”

“People had enough. The government doesn’t control speech. The earth isn’t a prison and they aren’t our wardens,” he added.

Meanwhile, US Senator for Utah Mike Lee  asked , “Who else wishes Mark Zuckerberg’s regret had kicked in before the damage was done—rather than years later?”

Founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, told his 3.3 million X followers that “we should root for our American industry leaders to get this stuff right” before adding: 

“It’s appropriate not to trust and be skeptical given what’s happened, but I would be overjoyed to watch Zuckerberg emerge as a free speech champion.”

Related: Mark Zuckerberg calls for open-source AI as Meta releases Llama 3.1

Fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk reiterated that his social media platform, X , “really is meant to support all viewpoints within the bounds of the laws of countries.”

He added that Zuckerberg’s confession of regret was “a step in the right direction.” 

Source: Elon Musk

In April, Cointelegraph reported that Wikipedia allegedly fought disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic in what critics labeled as censorship.

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