(The Center Square) – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a firestorm of controversy this week when he sent a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee admitting his mistake in caving to pressure from the Biden administration to censor Americans’ posts that contradicted the administration’s viewpoints on COVID-19.
“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,” the letter said.
Zuckerberg also said that Facebook made posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop harder to see during the 2020 election at the request of the FBI, the latest evidence of coordinated social media censorship driven by the federal government.
“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,” Zuckerberg continued. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
The FBI also warned multiple social media companies in 2020 that forthcoming news of a Hunter Biden laptop would likely come out but that it was merely Russian disinformation.
When that news did come out, reported by the New York Post, the media refused to pick it up and social media companies censored it. In fact, the New York Post had its Twitter account locked. The laptop was later confirmed as entirely real.
The House Judiciary Committee said in July of last year that Laura Dehmlow, the Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, testified to the committee that FBI personnel in fact knew the laptop was not Russian disinformation when they advised tech companies.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty laid this out in his court ruling in July of last year when he said the White House and FBI must stop pressuring social media companies to censor conservative speech, saying it violated the First Amendment, as The Center Square previously reported.
“Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition,” the ruling said. “Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines, opposition to COVID-19 mask and lockdowns, opposition to the lab leak theory of COVID-19, opposition to the validity of the 2020 election, opposition to President Biden’s policies, statements that the Hunter Biden laptop was true, and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature.”
Speaking of inappropriate social media censorship on COVID-19 or Hunter Biden’s laptop was once considered conspiracy by many media outlets and pundits.
“Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has joined the ranks of the crazed conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor dissent during Covid,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently dropped out of the presidential race to endorse former President Donald Trump, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Trump reacted strongly online Tuesday after the news broke, repeatedly calling it evidence the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
