Mark Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Covid-19 content in 2021

Mark Zuckerberg has now said that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Covid-19 content back in 2021.

The CEO of Meta – Facebook and Instagram’s parent company – wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday where he acknowledged that senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humorous and satire.”

In the letter, titled to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg admitted that he regretted not pushing back more on the administration.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he said.

“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Covid-19 misinformation was rife on social media platforms during the pandemic, despite tech companies’ efforts to curtail it.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court backed the Biden administration when it ruled the government can ask social media companies to remove harmful misinformation from their platforms.

In a 6-3 decision, justices threw out a lower court ruling that limited the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies, saying that decision was incorrect because the challengers – two states and five social media users – failed to show they were the proper groups to bring the lawsuit.

Zuckerberg did not go into specific detail about the content Facebook felt pressured to remove, but warned: “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

The billionaire tech