Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, felt under massive pressure during the coronavirus pandemic, from the US government led by President Joe Biden. This is at least what emerges from a letter from Meta’s CEO to Republican Jim Jordan that has now been made public and which was also shared by X owner Elon Musk – a supporter of Donald Trump – on Tuesday night.
“In 2021,” Zuckerberg recalls in the letter, “senior officials repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content.” This included “humor and satire,” Zuckerberg says. The decision as to whether and, if so, which content was taken offline ultimately rested with Meta. However, the company made some of the decisions under external pressure.
Not all of them were good in retrospect, Zuckerberg now says: “I also think that we made some decisions that, in hindsight and with new information, we would no longer make today.”
Zuckerberg also alludes to a story from 2020. Back then, before the US elections, the US secret service FBI warned of a Russian disinformation campaign about Joe Biden’s family. When a corresponding story appeared in the New York Post, Facebook commissioned “fact checkers” to check the story for plausibility. In the meantime, the ability to spread the story was restricted.
“In retrospect,” Zuckerberg now says, “we shouldn’t have downgraded the story.” As a result, the company changed its own policy on this matter. Today, there are no limits on the reach of stories that are still being investigated by the company’s own fact checkers. In the podcast by Joe Rogan Zuckerberg had already commented on this in 2022.
