An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was pressured by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “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 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, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House replied 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 think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely 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 goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.
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 globally located and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove 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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