Speaking of the First Amendment: Mark Zuckerberg Describes “Pressure” from White House on Content

​A letter sent on Monday to the House Judiciary Committee by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should put to rest whether “jawboning” by the government of highly regulated social media companies on their content moderation is taken as mere suggestions, or as something much more.
 
Zuckerberg wrote to the committee Chairman Jim Jordan:
 
“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. 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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
 
Zuckerberg also addressed the Hunter-Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 election. He writes that the FBI warned Meta that this story was Russian disinformation. So when Meta saw a New York Post story reporting on the allegations, “we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
 
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again … for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
 
As Protect The 1st has said before, government jawboning of highly regulated companies on content moderation cannot help but veer toward censorship. If government agents want to identify a post as dangerous or as foreign disinformation, let them do so publicly.