Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The letter relates to the committee’s investigation of the Biden administration’s war on free speech. This is the most significant language:
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.
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us 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. 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 U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
I don’t know whether the facts as characterized by Zuckerberg will be sufficient for the courts ultimately to find a violation of the First Amendment by the Biden Administration, should such a case ever come to fruition following the Supreme Court’s inconclusive resolution of Murthy v. Missouri. Likely not. But if we take Zuckerberg at his word–I see no reason not to–Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are now prepared, to some degree, to resist government pressure to collude in censoring conservatives and other dissidents. That is a big improvement from where we were a few years ago.
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