Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Facebook Was Pressured by Biden Admin to Censor COVID-19 Content and Hunter Laptop Story

The Biden administration threatened to reduce the flow of government funds to Facebook during last year’s presidential campaign, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday, and stated it was wrong to censor The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story.

As reported, in a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg responded that the White House and several other top Biden’s officials demanded that Meta ‘suppress’ the information concerning COVID in 2021.

The content that the Biden administration asked Meta to remove was ‘humor and satire,’ as stated by the Facebook founder, and he has expressed that he has regrets with regard to his compliance with some of the requests.

“I think the intervention part of the government was wrong and it is my biggest regret that we did not vehemently come out against it,” he typed. “I also remember there are some decisions we have taken that, had we possessed more information, we would not have taken. ”

Zuckerberg, 40, stated that in the future, should the government make such demands again, things will not be like this.

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“As I told our teams back then, I know that this is pretty hot, but I believe that we should not lower our content standards at the behest of any administration in either party, and we are ready to resist if something like this happens again,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg also said in a separate statement that freezing The Post’s explosive expose on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election was wrong.

Speaking to the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating Facebook’s content regulation policies, he declared they had received a notice from the FBI stating that there was a possible Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian company where Hunter Biden served on the board, before the decision to limit the sharing of the explosive October 2020 story was made.

“When in the fall we saw a New York Post story that contained leaks about corruption accusations against the family of the then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, we forwarded that article to the fact-checking service and suspended it pending the reply,” Zuckerberg said.

“It has since been stated that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and, in today’s terms, we should not have debunked the story,” he said.

Zuckerberg fully explained to Jordan that Meta has measures that prevent such an incidence of the stories being censored again.

“We were wrong and have amended our policies and working processes so that this does not happen again—for example, we no longer “archive” things in the US and wait for fact-checkers as I did,” responded the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

This apology, which Zuckerberg penned to Jordan, is a much more forceful acknowledgment of errors made by the social networking giant vis-à-vis The Post’s laptop exposé than the latter that the internet mogul gave in April 2022 with Joe Rogan’s assistance, where he noted that the story was suppressed when it was not Russian disinformation, which in fact stinks.

“After the facts, the fact-checkers studied it, and no one could say it was false… I think it stinks, though, in the same way that probably having to undergo a criminal trial but then being acquitted is not very good.”

“I think the process was pretty reasonable,” he added, though he remained a supporter of the censorship attempt. “Many people were still able to pass it around. We received many complaints stating that that was the situation. ”

To the extent that The Post exposed Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, there was evidence of tens of thousands of emails between the president’s son and business partners that exposed how the first son used his political influence overseas in his business transactions.

Zuckerberg also pointed out that he won’t spend more than $400 million this cycle to finance local elections after the so-called “Zuckerbucks” were heavily criticized by the Republicans as a ploy to influence the 2020 vote.

“They were designed to be non-partisan—spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities,” he said of his motives. “However, based on what I have presented, this work cannot move forward without acknowledging the fact that some people will be convinced this work benefited one team over the other. ”

“It was not the case of wanting to be pro-actively involved in one side or the other or giving the appearance of doing so and therefore I do not intend to make the same contribution this round.”