Mark Zuckerberg just had to eat several large helpings of crow.And some minor political flap wasn’t on the menu. As the Wall Street Journal first reported, the CEO of Facebook and Meta expressed regret on such weighty matters as government-induced censorship and free speech. It’s good for Zuck to accept some degree of responsibility, but it’s kinda too late. By about three years.The admissions came in a letter to Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman, and is a major win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz kid usually digs in defensively, with vague promises of future reform.
After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White House officials had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.” That is an important distinction. The Biden pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could, and sometimes did, say no. But much of the time, the giant social media site just caved.And Facebook had a publicly proclaimed agenda: prodding millions of people to take Covid vaccines.
Zuckerberg said the administration pressure “was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” His company “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today…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.” I don’t know: How confident are you that Facebook would publicly push back on some hot-button issue today?
A Biden White House spokesman, in lawyerly language that didn’t quite respond to Zuck’s accusations, said it had “encouraged 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 American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”