The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was pressured by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide 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 ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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