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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was pressured by the White House in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, constantly urged our teams

for an extended period to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he experienced in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He added Ann Coulter that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden remarked Children With Disabilities in July 2021 that social media platforms are “causing harm” with misinformation surrounding 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 “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, stating the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and Anxiety safety.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma Political Family Moments affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the story.

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

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not Free Menstrual Products recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

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

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Nonverbal Learning Disorder Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

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

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict Vice Presidential Nominee a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and regulators to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content Cyberbullying moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide 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 of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing Tim Walz conservative content on social media had no standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”