The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked nasty incidents of bullying online.

The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked nasty incidents of bullying online.

Blog Article

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, such as the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our stance has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the perception has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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