The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid-19 on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.
In a letter to the US House of Representatives judiciary committee, Mr Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.
“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 humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he wrote in letter to the committee’s head, Jim Jordan. “I believe the government pressure was wrong.”
During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation alerts to users when they commented on or liked posts that were judged to contain false information about Covid. The company also deleted posts criticising Covid vaccines, and suggestions the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory.
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In the 2020 US presidential election campaign, President Biden accused social media platforms such as Facebook of “killing people” by allowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform.
“I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Mr Zuckerberg said in his letter. “I regret we were not more outspoken about it.
“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction. And we are ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Mr Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Mr Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story”.
The House judiciary committee, which is controlled by Republicans, called Mr Zuckerberg’s admissions a “big win for free speech” in a post on the committee’s Facebook page.
The White House defended its actions during the pandemic, saying it encouraged “responsible actions” to protect public health and safety. “Our position has been clear and consistent,” it said. “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.”
There is 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 cannot say online, while some governments say that an overly laissez-faire stance can promote criminal behaviour. 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. - Guardian/Bloomberg
