Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to censor COVID-19 content

(Reuters) -Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior officials in the Biden administration had pressured his social media company to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic, adding that he would push back if this were to happen again.

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

"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 Committee on the Judiciary 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 and Meta did not respond to a request for comment outside U.S. business hours.

The letter was addressed to Jim Jordan, the chairman of the committee and a Republican. In its Facebook post, the 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 Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru; editing by Miral Fahmy)