Too many years too late.
The Honorable Jim Jordan
Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
United States House of Representatives
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515Chairman Jordan:
I appreciate the Committee’s interest in content moderation on online platforms. As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation, I welcome the opportunity to share what I’ve taken away from this process.
There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our platforms are for everyone – we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.
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 humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. 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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that 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. Like I said 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.
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. 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 U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Respectfully,
/s/ Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Meta Platforms, Inc.
Update:
Comments professor Jonathan Turley, in Zuckerberg’s Censorship Admission is More Contrived than Contrite: that Zuckerberg’s mea culpa only came after he was forced to release documents he was sitting on for years:
For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim.
Zuckerberg’s sudden regret only came after his company fought for years to conceal the evidence of its work with the government to censor opposing views. Zuckerberg was finally compelled to release the documents by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the House Judiciary Committee.
Now forced to admit what many of us have long alleged, Zuckerberg is really, really sorry.
While Musk was fighting the censorship police alone, Zucerberg continued to remain on the sidelines:
I noted that Zuckerberg continued to refuse to release this information after Elon Musk exposed this system in his release of the “Twitter Files.”
Zuckerberg stayed silent as Musk was viciously attacked by anti-free speech figures in Congress and the media. He was fully aware of his own company’s similar conduct but stayed silent.
When the White House and President Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, Facebook continued to withhold evidence that they too were pressured to suppress the story before the election.
When the censorship system was recently put before the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the justices asked about evidence of coordination and pressure from the government. In Murthy, states successfully showed lower courts that there was coercion from the government in securing an injunction. The Biden administration denied such pressure and the Court rejected the standing of plaintiffs, blocked an order to stop the censorship, and sent the case back down to the lower court.
Zuckerberg still remained silent.