Zuckerberg admits Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

'The government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,' says Facebook founder

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving ammunition to conspiracy theorists with a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he claims the Biden administration pressured his company on multiple occasions to censor posts related to COVID-19.

The letter penned by Zuckerberg, published on X and Facebook by the House Judiciary Republicans, alleges that senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, pressured Meta "for months" in 2021 to censor certain posts related to the coronavirus, "including humor and satire." Zuckerberg said Administration officials "expressed a lot of frustration" when Meta disagreed with government justifications, but acknowledged that some posts were still taken down. 

"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg said. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."

The Meta founder added that his company made some choices that, looking back on them, were bad calls, and said he still believes Meta shouldn't compromise its content standards due to political pressure. 

"We're ready to push back if something like this happens again," Zuckerberg asserted. 

The Register approached Meta to validate the content of the letter, but we haven't heard back. Other outlets have confirmed its authenticity.

It's well and good to know that Zuckerberg actually wrote the letter, but it's light on specifics. We know Meta removed tens of millions of COVID-19 misinformation posts in a single quarter of 2021 alone (the only period that year it reported such numbers), but it's not clear if some of those posts were censored at the Biden administration's request or not.

We asked multiple people for more specifics – Meta, both sides of the House Judiciary, and the White House – but only the latter responded. Even then, the Biden administration didn't answer any specific questions.

"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety," a White House spokesperson told us, echoing what it had related to other media outlets. "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 American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."

Nothing in Zuckerberg's letter suggests the Biden administration forced Meta to remove content.

Talk about timing

Zuckerberg also took the opportunity to further fan the flames of an all-but-smoldering conspiracy theory by readmitting what he told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2022 about the suppression of a story about the salacious contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of then-US presidential candidate Joe Biden. 

As he said two years ago, Zuckerberg wrote in the letter that Meta "temporarily demoted" a story about Hunter Biden's laptop while waiting for fact-checker validation. Meta was warned by the FBI in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election about Russian misinformation around Biden's family and Hunter's ties to defunct Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," Zuckerberg said. "We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again – for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the US while waiting for fact checkers."

Zuckerberg said he's keen to not be seen as appearing to play a role in influencing elections, and as such he also plans to not fund election infrastructure support initiatives he'd given money to through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the previous election cycle.

"[The contributions] were designed to be non-partisan," Zuckerberg said. "Despite the analyses I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other." ®