Mark Zuckerberg regrets caving in to Biden administration pressure on Covid-19 content

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has told a committee in the Republican-controlled House that he and his company regret bowing to pressure from US President Joe Biden's administration to censor various pieces of Covid-19 content that appeared on the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms.

"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 humour and satire," Mr Zuckerberg wrote. Meta did not necessarily agree with the requests, but decided to censor the content anyway, he added.

"Ultimately it was our decision to take down the content, and we own our decisions," he wrote. "We're ready to push back if something like this happens again."

The letter, addressed to Republican congressman and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, was in response to the committee's various requests for more details regarding how Meta censors, throttles and moderates content on its popular and powerful social media platforms.

Mr Zuckerberg also said in the letter that the social media company should not have demoted a New York Post story published weeks before the 2020 election, which contained allegations regarding Mr Biden’s son, Hunter.

The FBI had warned Meta that a Russian disinformation operation might have been behind the content and sources of the article, he said.

In the context of the previous 2016 presidential election, Russian disinformation was proved to be prevalent on Meta’s Facebook platform, so the company was extremely cautious shortly before the 2020 election.

“We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in the letter to Mr Jordan. “It has since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and, in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

The timing of Mr Zuckerberg’s letter to the Judiciary Committee could raise eyebrows for several reasons.

It comes weeks before the 2024 US presidential election, with most polls showing a very close contest between Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee and former US president Donald Trump.

The White House responded to Mr Zuckerberg's letter to the Judiciary Committee, defending the content moderation requests made to Meta.

"Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people while making independent choices about the information they present," read the statement issued to various US media outlets.

Mr Zuckerberg's correspondence also comes days after Telegram’s Russian founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France amid several reports and accusations regarding the lack of content moderation on the company’s messaging platform that is used by more than 900 million people.

Encryption battles with regulators

The battles over content moderation are hardly new. However, they are beginning to gain momentum and prompt various responses from governments and regulators around the world.

Back in 2023, citing national security fears, Iraq's Telecoms Ministry temporarily blocked Telegram's messaging app amid national security concerns.

Founded in 2013, Telegram has long boasted encryption features that preserve the privacy of messages sent by users.

It even had a bounty programme set up for users who could find security flaws in the app, thus allowing the company to fix the bugs and make the platform more secure.

Those privacy features, combined with compatibility across just about every computing and smartphone platform, allowed Telegram to grow to the point where it became the second most used messaging app in the world, behind WhatsApp.

However, the encryption features, combined with the company's refusals to co-operate with various law enforcement agencies seeking to uncover illegal activities on the app such as drug trade and human trafficking, have made it a target.

In Russia, where Telegram was founded, the company also came under criticism.

“The Telegram team had to leave Russia due to local IT regulations and has tried a number of locations as its base, including Berlin, London and Singapore,” the company posted in the FAQ section on its website.

It currently operates out of Dubai, and its founder, Mr Durav, has dual UAE-French citizenship.

Earlier in August, telecoms regulators in Turkey made the decision to temporarily block Instagram after reports that the Meta-owned platform had failed to moderate certain pieces of content, while also being overzealous when it came to moderating content about Palestine and Gaza.

The blocking of Instagram in Turkey, while applauded by some in the government, prompted anger from various users and small businesses who relied on the app for economic purposes.

The entire incident, which lasted nine days, was a small example of the complexities of enforcing local laws upon powerful social media platforms that often see the world as borderless while, at the same time, ensnaring those who use the platforms in the middle.

Earlier in the year, Meta also voluntarily pulled its Threads social media platform from Turkey, after regulators in the country accused the app of breaching data laws, although the company denied the accusation.

Zuckerberg and election infrastructure

Towards the end of Mr Zuckerberg's letter to the Judiciary Committee, he addressed an initiative he helped fund in 2020 to improve citizen voting access and participation, ultimately saying that he would not be doing the same thing in 2024.

“I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure,” he wrote.

“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.”

Some critics of the voting infrastructure programme falsely accused it of being partisan, causing more criticism to be foisted upon Mr Zuckerberg.

“Despite the analysis I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefitted one party over the other,” he wrote.

“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role.”

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