An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.

An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.

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Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to limit content related to COVID-19, such as satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the administration, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. He further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 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 government from either side – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

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

Though Biden later revised these remarks, 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 communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

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

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

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

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, 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 said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities 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.” Zuckerberg stated his goal 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 “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of 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 company and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he held 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 of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs 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 establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to request a preliminary injunction.”
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