Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Joe Biden 'pressured' him to remove Covid content

By Kurt Wagner

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg alleged that Facebook was “pressured” by the US government to censor content related to Covid-19 during the global pandemic and that he regrets the company’s decision to accede to the demands.

“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 humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives. And while it was Meta’s decision whether to remove content, he continues, “the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

During the pandemic, Facebook officials drew ire from critics of lockdowns, vaccines and masking mandates because it removed certain posts, saying they contained misinformation related to the virus or otherwise went against its policies. In all, Facebook took down more than 20 million pieces of content in just over a year. Zuckerberg joins other social media executives, including Jack Dorsey, former CEO of blogging platform Twitter, in lamenting past instances of content moderation that, in their view, went too far.

There’s a growing global debate over how far social media companies should go in policing the comments, images and other content posted by their users. Some platforms believe they should be hands off when it comes to telling users what they can and can’t say online, while some governments say that an overly laissez-faire stance can beget criminal behavior. French officials arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov during the weekend, alleging that the company failed to adequately combat crime on the messaging app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material.

On the eve of the US presidential election, pitting Vice President Kamala Harris against former president Donald Trump, Zuckerberg is also taking pains to appear non-partisan. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, the contents of which were posted to the Facebook page of the House Judiciary Committee and confirmed by Meta. He was writing in reference to contributions made in the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.