• The founder, chairman and CEO of the Meta platforms, Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter dated August 26, 2024, to Jim Jordan, chairman of the Judiciary Committee United States House Representatives, unveils to have received undue pressure from senior officials of the Biden Administration to suppress some of the COVID-19 content inclusive of humor and satire.

The founder, chairman and CEO of the Meta platforms, Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter dated August 26, 2024, to Jim Jordan, chairman of the Judiciary Committee United States House Representatives, unveils to have received undue pressure from senior officials of the Biden Administration to suppress some of the COVID-19 content inclusive of humor and satire.

"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," said Zuckerberg in his letter.

In the letter, he expressed deep displeasure, mentioning that the pressure received was inappropriate. At the same time, he expressed profound regret for not being more vocal on the issue in its infancy.

He acknowledges that the pressure propagated some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, they wouldn't have made today.

"Like I said to our teams at the time, I strongly feel that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction and we are ready to push back if something like this happens again," he added.

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Zuckerberg vividly reminisces back to 2020, when, upon seeing a New York story reporting on corruption allegations attached to Joe Biden's family, who had then been nominated the Democratic presidential candidate, they temporarily pulled the story down and sent it for a review from the fact-checkers.

In conjunction with the story's temporary relegation, which was later confirmed not to be Russian disinformation, the company has made a firm commitment to never alter its policies. It no longer temporarily demotes content in the United States while waiting for confirmation from the fact-checkers, a decision we hope will provide a sense of security.