The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.
The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”
“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 public, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
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 “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold 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 the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide 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, in a victory for the administration, 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 standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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