A spokesman for the White House said that the Biden administration simply told Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platform to be responsible, even though Zuckerberg himself said he was “pressured” to “censor” certain material.
The House Judiciary Committee just released a letter from Zuckerberg in which he talks about how the Biden-Harris administration has asked many times to remove content, even comedy content, that has to do with COVID-19 and vaccines.
“This government pushed people to take reasonable steps to keep the public safe and healthy.”
For months, Zuckerberg wrote, “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, frequently pressed our teams to block certain COVID-19 content, including humor and comedy, and got very angry with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
When asked, the White House wiped its hands of the situation and wouldn’t admit that Zuckerberg used words like “pressure” and “control.”
The White House told the Guardian, “When faced with a dangerous pandemic, this government urged reasonable measures to protect public health and safety.”
As a result, the White House source said that tech companies were to blame for “independently” choosing what material to put on their apps.
The message went on to say, “Our view has been clear and consistent. We think that tech companies and other private players should think about how their actions affect the people of the United States while still setting their own rules for the information they show.”
Every member of the media got the same message from the White House.
Some social media companies, like Elon Musk’s X platform, which shared the Twitter Files. These papers showed that the federal government wanted to hide some stories, like the ones about the Hunter Biden laptop.
In his letter to Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg also talked about the same problem.
“We were warned about “potential Russian misinformation” about the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy business Burisma before the 2020 presidential election,” Zuckerberg wrote.
During the same time, the Biden-Harris government also tried to set up a Disinformation Governance Board to keep an eye on speech. The Department of Homeland Security shut down its controversial misinformation board in 2022 after a lot of people said it reminded them of how the Soviet Union controlled public debate.
