Zuckerberg says Biden admin pressured Meta to 'censor' COVID-19 content

By Gnaneshwar Rajan and Nandita Bose

(Reuters) - Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration had pressured the company to "censor" COVID-19 content during the pandemic, apparently referring to White House requests to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.

In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that he regretted not speaking up about this pressure earlier, as well as other decisions he had made as the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around removing certain content.

In July 2021, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, said social media platforms like Facebook "are killing people" for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform.

Others like former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy publicly said the company was not doing enough to take down misinformation, and was making it harder to fight the pandemic and save lives.

Facebook said at the time it was taking "aggressive steps" to fight such misinformation. The Biden administration ultimately eased up on its criticism, even as vaccine lies continued to spread on social media.

In the letter to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Monday, Zuckerberg said his company was "pressured" into "censoring" content and that the company would push back if it faced such demands again.

"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," Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was posted by the Judiciary Committee on its Facebook page.

"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it," he wrote. "I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."

The White House said in a statement the administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety when confronted with a deadly pandemic.

"Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."

Zuckerberg has recently tried to appeal to conservative users, by complimenting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s response to an assassination attempt as "badass" and going on right-wing podcasts. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jim Jordan, is a longtime Trump ally.

In its Facebook post, the Judiciary Committee called the letter a "big win for free speech" and said that Zuckerberg had admitted that "Facebook censored Americans".

In the letter, Zuckerberg also said he would not make any contributions to support electoral infrastructure in this year's presidential election so as to "not play a role one way or another" in the November vote.

During the last election, which was held in 2020 during the pandemic, the billionaire contributed $400 million via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropy venture with his wife, to support election infrastructure, a move that drew criticism and lawsuits from some groups that said the move was partisan.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington and Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru; editing by Miral Fahmy, Heather Timmons and Jonathan Oatis)