Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he regrets bowing to what he described as pressure from the US government to censor Covid-19 content during the pandemic.
In a letter to US house committee chair Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg wrote that senior officials from Joe Biden’s administration had “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 that we were not more outspoken about it,” he added. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
The White House has defended its actions, arguing its 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,” it said in a statement.
Facebook added alerts to posts alleged to be presenting misinformation during the pandemic. It also deleted posts which were critical of the Covid-19 vaccine or suggested the pandemic had emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Biden has previously blamed social media platforms for “killing people” by allowing misinformation surrounding Covid vaccines to be spread online.
In his letter, Zuckerberg also revealed his company had temporarily “demoted” content tied to Joe Biden’s son Hunter as it awaited responses from fact checkers, following warnings of a Russian disinformation operation from the FBI.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he said.
“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 US while waiting for fact checkers.”