Zuckerberg's letter to Jordan: Meta was pressured to censor
Biden-Harris admin. "repeatedly pressured our team..."
On Aug. 26, the House Oversight GOP’s account on X dropped a letter from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that described a pressure campaign my Biden-Harris officials to censor Americans on Meta’s platform Facebook.
Zuckerberg told Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) "senior officials" from the Biden-Harris administration as well as the White House itself, "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire."
This is how the White House responded when asked for comment by FOX News:
"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."
Key sections of Zuckerberg’s letter include the Biden-Harris Admin. had "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans:
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured 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 didn't agree."
Facebook did censor Americans:
"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure."
Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story:
"That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
Read Zuckerberg's letter to Jordan.
More To The Story
Over at Public News, Michael Shellenberger writes that the implication of this letter, with direct mention of the Biden family and Burisma, is that the agencies pressuring Zuckerberg and Meta may have broken major laws. He says the letter is evidence the CIA and FBI violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (commonly called the Wiretap Act) and/or the Hatch Act of 1939.
"As a result of this, I now feel comfortable saying that the evidence is overwhelming that both the FBI and CIA violated a surveillance law, spread disinformation, and deliberately interfered in the 2020 election," Shellenberger writes.
Expect Jordan and the Committee to run with this in the near future, especially given the letter further bolters censorship claims reported in the Twitter Files.
Some related Flashbacks:
Jan. 31, 2024
Meta, TikTok, X and other social media companies testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee
July 25, 2023
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) considers holding Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress for repeatedly failing to produce the documents related to Facebook censorship that were requested by the Committee.
Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan the FBI warned that the NY Post laptop story was "disinformation."
"The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'."
Top social media platforms testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology about their roles in censoring COVID-19 information online.
The hearing was titled, "Disinformation Nation: Social Media's Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation." In his opening statement, Zuckerberg used the term "third-party fact checking" for what he now seems to admit was censorship.
At Facebook, we do a lot to fight misinformation. We have removed content that could lead to imminent real-world harm. We have built an unprecedented third-party fact-checking program, and if something is rated false, then we have warning labels and significantly reduce its distribution. We invest a lot in directing billions of people to authoritative information. The system isn't perfect. But it is the best approach that we have found to address misinformation in line with our country's values. It is not possible to catch every piece of harmful content without infringing on people's freedoms in a way that I don't think that we would be comfortable with as a society.
The full hearing video is on YouTube.