Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. Photo/ Courtesy.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that they received immense pressure from the Biden administration to censor content about COVID 19 in their platforms during the pandemic.
Expressing his deep regret, Zuckerberg explained how senior white house officials from the Biden’s administration pressured Meta which runs both Facebook and Instagram to censor COVID related content.
In a letter to the Chairman of the US house of representatives judiciary committee Jim Jordan he stated that “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,”
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it, I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” he added.
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Citing in the letter dated 26 August, he claimed that in 2020 ahead of the presidential elections the FBI had warned them about a Russian miss information campaign against Biden’s family.
“it’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation,” he wrote.
“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” citing that the company had to temporarily demote content in regards to the matter.
