In a surprising revelation, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has confessed that the Biden-Harris administration exerted pressure on the social media giant to suppress certain content, including the Hunter Biden laptop story from October 2020.
Zuckerberg's admission came in a letter to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, where he detailed the administration's attempts to influence the platform's content moderation policies.
According to The Post Millennial, Zuckerberg's letter outlined the company's stance on the ongoing discourse around the U.S. government's interaction with Meta, Facebook's parent company. He underscored the platform's commitment to "promoting free speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way."
However, Zuckerberg's letter also revealed a startling fact. "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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," he wrote.
The House Judiciary Committee responded to Zuckerberg's admission with a statement, saying, "Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin 'pressured' Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech."
The letter was a culmination of Jordan and the Judiciary Committee's investigation into the alleged campaign by the Biden-Harris administration to influence Facebook's content moderation. Jordan has released numerous Facebook Files exposing the censorship scheme and pressure by the administration.
Zuckerberg, in his letter, took responsibility for the decisions made by Facebook. "Ultimately," he wrote, "it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."
He also admitted that some of the choices made by the platform, in retrospect, were misguided. He emphasized that he had instructed his teams not to compromise their content standards due to pressure from any administration. He assured that the platform is prepared to resist such pressure in the future.
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that the FBI had warned Facebook about a potential Russian disinformation operation concerning the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election. This warning, he confirmed, was the impetus for the platform to suppress the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop. However, he admitted that this was a mistake, as it was later clarified that the reporting was not Russian disinformation.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also addressed his contributions during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. He insisted that these contributions were non-partisan and aimed at ensuring local election jurisdictions had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during the pandemic.
Despite accusations that his work favored one party over the other, Zuckerberg maintained that his goal was to remain neutral. He concluded by stating that he does not plan on making a similar contribution in the upcoming election cycle. This statement aligns with his recent conversation with Donald Trump, in which he reportedly said he would not be supporting Democrats in 2024.
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