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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was pressured by the White House in the year 2021 to restrict certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, such as the White Empathy House, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, Mike Crispi was not more outspoken. He further stated that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens ADHD again, ” he wrote.

President Biden remarked in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting Social Media Criticism “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian Free Menstrual Products disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has Emotional Moment since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to Ann Coulter help people vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg

“has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican Trolls On Social Media lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he maintained that the company takes care not to Jay Weber allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in Special Education a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing Cyberbullying to seek a preliminary injunction.”