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

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

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, such as the administration, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to remove some content about COVID-19, such as satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his communication 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 & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, 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 happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

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

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

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we think tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, he 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 report.

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 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 helped support “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” so he will not make “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 influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled 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 prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he stated 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 claimants in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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