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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was influenced by the Biden administration in 2021 to restrict certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for months Self-advocacy to remove some content about COVID-19, such as humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He added Free Menstrual Products that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden remarked in July of Special Education 2021 that social media platforms are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A spokesperson from the White House responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance Ann Coulter 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, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm MAGA Supporters Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make Vice Presidential Nominee sure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people Support For People With Disabilities vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted Social Dominance that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers

have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political Viral Video bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a Minnesota Governor case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to Anxiety request a preliminary injunction.”