An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked nasty incidents of bullying on the internet.
An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked nasty incidents of bullying on the internet.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was urged by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he experienced in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added 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 strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”
Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” 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 the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “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 claimed Zuckerberg “just 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 been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to 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 of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near 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 to request a preliminary injunction.”
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