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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was pressured by the White House in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, including the administration, repeatedly pressured Public Display Of Affection our teams for months to remove certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. Trolls On Social Media Zuckerberg further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden stated in Hope Walz July of 2021 that social media networks are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our position Gwen Walz has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm ADHD Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to

“ensure this does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during Viral Moment a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration Jay Weber pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the perception has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision Special Education to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media giant and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he Alec Lace stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government Gus Walz of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.” Children With Disabilities