An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.

An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.

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Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was influenced by the White House in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured 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 said.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year 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 government in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.

President Biden stated in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

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

A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“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 public, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter 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, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He stated 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 pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story 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 limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located 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 win for the White House, 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 said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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