An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.

An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time provoked ugly bullying attacks on the internet.

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta 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 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, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said 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 stated his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media company and regulators to little effect.

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

In addition, he said 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 decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near 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 request a preliminary injunction.”
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