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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our Parent-child Relationship teams for an extended period to censor some content about COVID-19, such as satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more Social Media Criticism outspoken. Zuckerberg 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 government in either direction â€" and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” Free Menstrual Products Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated 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 posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

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

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

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

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

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 House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people Public Display Of Affection vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He stated his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted Kamala Harris that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology 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 Ann Coulter examined Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In MAGA Supporters 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 decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of Empathy suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”