Meta CEO expresses remorse over yielding to government influence on pandemic content

On August 26, House Judiciary Chair Jeff Jordan shared a letter on the official X account.

In the letter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his regret for kissing the ring to alleged pressure from the Biden administration during the pandemic. Despite his immense fortune, Zuckerberg revealed that he was swayed by political peer ‘pressures’ when navigating the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the Covid pandemic.

During the pandemic, Facebook tried to fight Covid misinformation. Remember when they’d flag posts with fake Covid info? They also axed content trashing vaccines or saying the virus came from a Chinese lab.In the 2020 election, Biden went after Facebook, saying they were “killing people” by letting vaccine misinformation spread. Looking back, Zuckerberg admitted Meta wouldn’t make the same calls with hindsight.

The Meta founder wrote: “Ultimately, 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.

“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

He also added: “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction—and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

“I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”