Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday he regretted succumbing to pressure from the US government to censor COVID posts on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic, US media reported.
Zuckerberg said senior officials in Joe Biden’s White House administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain COVID-19 content” during the pandemic. He said in a letter to Jim Jordan, the head of the US House of Representatives judiciary committee:
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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. I believe the government pressure was wrong.
During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation warnings for users when they commented on or liked posts they believed contained false information about COVID.
The company also deleted posts criticising Covid vaccines and suggesting the virus had been developed in a Chinese lab.
During the 2020 US election campaign, Biden accused social media platforms such as Facebook of “killing people” by allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform. Zuckerberg said:
I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. I regret we were not more outspoken about it. 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 are ready to push back if something like this happens again.
The White House defended its actions during the pandemic, saying it encourages “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.” It said in a statement:
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.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook removed more than 20 million posts for violating a ban on spreading misinformation about COVID-19. Following the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in Paris, social network X owner Elon Musk said Mark Zuckerberg would not face detention because “he restricts free speech and gives governments secret access to user data.”
