The owner of the biggest social media company in the world has admitted to censoring information on his platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, who is the Chairman and CEO of Meta, has admitted that the company suppressed content due to pressure from the US government under the current President Joe Biden administration.
Zuckerberg, who’s company owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, revealed all this in a letter sent to the Congress Committee on the Judiciary. Content related to the Covid-19 pandemic was throttled following months of pressure from state officials including from the White house.
“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,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg.
While claiming the Meta team found the government demands wrong, the founder of Facebook acknowledges they did bow to the pressure, “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,”.
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
As the USA was gearing up for the presidential election in 2020, the FBI did also pressure Meta to suppress conversation around Hunter Biden laptop and his association with Burisma, a Ukrainian company accused of corrupt dealings. The Burisma corruption story was later revived by republicans in a bid to impeach Mr. Biden due to the fact his son served on the board of the company.
“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.”
Zuckerberg states the FBI wanted the Burisma story to be throttled claiming it was Russian disinformation, a claim Meta later established to be false.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” added Mr. Zuckerberg.
The timing of Zuckerberg’s letter to the congress committee is intriguing. It comes almost a day after the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on grounds that his platform lacks content moderation.
Zuckerberg Platforms Work with Governments to Censor Citizens
In addition, the letter comes a month after Kenyans claimed Meta platforms were suppressing content related to protests against the government. Former rugby player and content creator, Dennis Ombachi, claimed his numbers on the platforms were suspiciously low.
READ: Is Meta Censoring the Protests in Kenya?
Last year, it was found that Facebook helped stifle speech in Vietnam. The company has also developed special software to help it censor content in China as demanded by authorities. Further, the Meta owned platform Facebook, has a portal for government officials to request content be suppressed.
These revelations prove that indeed governments from East and West, are working to muzzle citizens on social media platforms. Zuckerberg claims Meta has changed its policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
However, he conspicuously said that the company will “no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S”. This leaves it open for the rest of the world, and considering Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are in the top four most used social media apps in the world, not assuring for many people.
