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After years of denying the accusations from users, Meta’s CEO finally comes clean about his decision to cave to the state’s demands and remove dissenting posts about COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee admitting that Facebook censored user content due to pressure from the White House and the FBI.
The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the Biden administration’s efforts to force social media companies to censor content that it considered disinformation, misinformation, or malinformation (defined as facts that are used in a harmful way).
Over the last two years, scores of documents have been released revealing rampant censorship efforts, while numerous lawsuits have been filed against the government by medical doctors, journalists, conservative publications, non-profits, and others who say they were blocked or kicked off of social media for posting dissenting views or facts.
In the case of Murthy v. Missouri, for instance, federal courts blocked the Biden administration from coercing social media companies to censor content the government didn’t like, but the Supreme Court recently ruled that plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge and lifted the injunction.
Other censorship-related suits continue, including one brought by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and another brought by former New York Times science reporter Alex Berenson.
After years of denying the charges, Zuckerberg now admits that the administration did, in fact, coerce Meta to censor users but also said that the blame, ultimately, rested with Meta. He wrote,
“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. 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.
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. Like I said to our teams at the time, 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 again.”
Zuckerberg said that Meta chose to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election because the FBI informed Meta that it was Russian disinformation, something that turned out to be a lie from the intelligence community. Hunter Biden has since been convicted on federal gun law charges, in part because an FBI forensic employee certified under oath the authenticity of the laptop, which contained evidence of criminal activity.
In his letter, Zuckerberg noted, “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Republicans on the House Committee on the Judiciary responded to the letter with a post on X, stating, “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.”
While the admission is big news, it doesn’t reveal anything that hasn’t been exposed already.
Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University and the author of the The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, wryly claimed,
“For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim.”
Turley pointed out that Facebook only released files regarding censorship when compelled.
He also said that Zuckerberg stayed silent as the Supreme Court asked for evidence of pressure from the government to censor content.
Zuckerberg’s letter comes after Biden officials have denied pressuring social media companies.
Berenson, who was removed from Twitter for his posts about COVID-19, said that Zuckerberg’s letter will help his case against the Biden administration.
“It’s significant for my lawsuit; there is no question about that,” he stated. “We are going to quote that letter, as we amend Berenson v. Biden, which we’re doing.”
Berenson credits the House Committee on the Judiciary for exposing the government effort to censor citizens. “If you look at the work of Jim Jordan’s committee, you can see the pressure. It was not one phone call or one email. There was significant pressure put on Facebook and Twitter, and to a lesser extent Amazon and YouTube, for months and months by the Biden administration.”
Not all that long ago, if someone said that Facebook, Twitter (before it became X), or YouTube were censoring posts, spiking content, or banning users for dissent, they were labeled a conspiracy theorist.
Now the CEO of one of the most powerful social media companies in the world is saying that it did, in fact, censor content — and at the behest of the U.S. government.
The federal government, which is supposed to uphold the Constitution, actually crushed the First Amendment rights of Americans. It despised their right both to speak and to hear information — information that was true and would have possibly saved lives and swung an election.
What this should signal to every American is that the federal government has become corrupt, power hungry, and tyrannical. Nothing could threaten the liberty of Americans more.
The Constitution was written for the purpose of outlining Americans’ rights and limiting the power of the government. Some states refused to ratify the Constitution without the promise of a bill of rights.
Our Bill of Rights consists of 10 amendments to halt government intrusion on liberty and to protect Americans from tyranny. The very first right listed is, of course, the First Amendment, which reads,
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
A massive federal government bureaucracy demanding that powerful media companies censor the posts of law-abiding citizens who are talking about and sharing their opinions and facts on the issues of the day? That is exactly what abridging free speech looks like.
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