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

“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, such as the White Children With Disabilities House, constantly urged 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 did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was Hope Walz not more vocal. He added 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 lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Nonverbal Learning Disorder he wrote.

President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated 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 promoting “responsible measures to safeguard

public health.”

“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we believe tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the communication that the FBI warned his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian Vice Presidential Nominee firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of 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 shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to Kamala Harris “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 “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote Trolls On Social Media safely during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

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

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted Special Education that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

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

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

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

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, 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, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a Democratic National Convention case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a Gwen Walz preliminary injunction.”