In an extraordinary letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw the Biden administration under the bus, saying that White House officials had pressured the company to censor posts, including those that were clearly humor or satire, about COVID-19 and to suppress reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg also conceded what seems obvious with regard to the ethics of the matter: that allowing the White House to shape Facebook content was wrong.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. 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 said.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, posted the letter on the social media platform X, calling it a “big win for free speech.”
In the letter, dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg offered details about how the Biden administration leaned on Meta, then called Facebook, and “repeatedly” pressured the company to censor content related to COVID-19. While he didn’t mention specific names, Zuckerberg said that “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House” were involved and that they “expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
Zuckerberg said that ultimately the decision to suppress content was the company’s and “we own our decisions.” But he made clear that the decisions were made because of the Biden administration’s pressure and that in doing so, the company compromised its own standards.
He also expressed regret for actions the company took to suppress reports about the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained information and images that were detrimental to both President Joe Biden and his son. In that case, Zuckerberg said, the company “temporarily demoted” the story while conducting internal fact-checking because the FBI had warned the company that Russia would be waging a disinformation campaign in order to interfere with the election.
“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. He added that Meta has changed its policies so that something like this cannot happen again.
Response to Zuckerberg’s letter ranged from celebration to cynicism, with Patrick Bet-David writing on X that Zuckerberg either wrote the letter because he’s being honorable, he’s done with Democrats or he’s getting ahead of a whistleblower. “Either way, this was a VERY HARD letter to write,” Bet-David said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his bid for the White House and endorsed former President Donald Trump, wrote wryly that Zuckerberg had joined the “crazed conspiracy theorists” who insisted that their content was being intentionally suppressed. Others said that Zuckerberg should not be so easily let off the hook, including Melissa Chen, who said her post about COVID-19 possibly coming from a lab leak was removed and her Facebook account temporarily suspended. Chen went on to detail the repercussions of the censorship, which she believes effectively shut down serious conversation and investigations into a lab leak for more than a year.
“We have not fully accounted for the consequences of Meta’s speech suppression. But it is absolutely not trivial because it likely prevented us from knowing the truth about one of the biggest coverups in our lifetime,” Chen wrote.
The fact that Chen can now freely write about a “cover-up” when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic shows how much has changed in the past four years when it comes to free speech on social media platforms. The emergence of alternative platforms to challenge Facebook, X and YouTube has had an effect, as have the congressional investigations and the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk.
Now, with Zuckerberg pushing back against censorship as Musk has, there’s a sense of a sea change within these powerful platforms, which have rightly been called the modern public square.
We know much more about how Musk and his platform has changed than we do about Zuckerberg, thanks in part to his voluminous posting. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed 42,000 of Musk’s posts dating to 2019 in an attempt to explain his politics; in February 2019, he tweeted, “I’m openly moderate,” and on July 13, right after the assassination attempt, he endorsed Trump. Beginning in 2022, he started posting more regularly about free speech, and in March, he conducted a poll asking if Twitter enabled free speech. More than 70% of respondents said no. Seven months later, he had acquired the platform, and its transformation under Musk resulted in the restoration of accounts that had been suspended, including the Babylon Bee, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kathy Griffin, Jordan Peterson and Trump.
It’s unclear if Zuckerberg has undergone the sort of transformation that Musk has, although he has said that Trump’s response to the shooting was inspiring. “On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight. I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg. (A writer for The New Republic dismissed that praise as pandering to the former president, who has called the Meta chief “Zuckerbucks.”)
Regardless, the Zuckerberg letter is, indeed, a win for free speech, and vindication for conservatives who have been crying foul about censorship for years, only to be told repeatedly that they were crying wolf. And the Biden administration, growing more irrelevant every day, has another stain on its legacy.