META owner Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to helping the Biden administration censor conservatives in the run-up to the 2020 election and “COVID misinformation” during the pandemic but insisted they pressured him to do so.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg vowed his company would fight back against any attempts at censorship in the future.
However, he also admitted the platform had ‘demoted’ stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The tech CEO said 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.”
However, he said the pressure “was wrong” and said he “regrets ‘that we were not more outspoken about it.”
“We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he added.
“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.”
A White House spokesperson told the Daily Mail that the Biden administration’s policy is to encourage big tech to act responsibly.
“When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. 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.”
A Meta spokesperson said told the Wall Street Journal the letter spoke for itself.
The Facebook founder also said that Meta would not repeat what it did in 2020, where they funded nonprofits to fund local election efforts to help Democrats.
In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave nearly $420 million to nonprofits that heavily favored Democratic counties.
The couple donated a whopping $419.5million to The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which the report says was given with specific conditions.
CTCL and CEIR then sent their funds to local governments to implement administrative practices, voting methods, data-sharing agreements,
As The Mail noted:
Analysis shows Biden-winning counties were three times more likely to get funding from the organizations than Trump ones, and the Democrats were reportedly given a significant boost in key swing states through promotion of practices that have typically favored their vote tally, such as mail-in voting.
Zuckerberg now acknowledges the perception of bias and promises not to do the same next time.
“Despite the analysis I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited 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. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Jordan called this a ‘big win for free speech” in a statement to X:
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