Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that his company's moderators faced significant pressure from the federal government to censor content on Facebook and Instagram—and that he regretted caving to it. In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), the committee's chairman, Zuckerberg explained that the pressure also applied to "humor and satire" and that in the future, Meta would not blindly obey the bureaucrats.
"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it," wrote Zuckerberg. "We're ready to pushback if something like this happens again."
The letter refers specifically to the widespread suppression of contrarian viewpoints relating to COVID-19. As I detailed in the cover story for Reason's March 2023 issue, federal bureaucrats pushed Facebook and Instagram to take down content that could theoretically contribute to vaccine hesitancy. President Joe Biden accused Meta of "killing people" by failing to moderate vaccine-skeptical content more aggressively. Eventually, the social media giant outsourced COVID-19 moderation to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leading to a vast crackdown on speech.
Email exchanges between Facebook moderators and CDC officials reveal that the government took a heavy hand in suppressing content. Health officials did not merely vet posts for accuracy but also made pseudo-scientific determinations about whether certain opinions could cause social "harm" by undermining the effort to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated. The CDC took the position that expressing skepticism about vaccinating children—most of whom are not at risk of a negative COVID-19 outcome—was a form of misinformation and should be policed.
"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," wrote Zuckerberg.
But COVID-19 content was not the only kind of speech the government went after. Zuckerberg also explains that the FBI warned him about Russian attempts to sow chaos on social media by releasing a fake story about the Biden family just before the 2020 election. This warning motivated Facebook to take action against the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story when it was published in October 2020. In his letter, Zuckerberg states that this was a mistake and that moving forward, Facebook will never again demote stories pending approval from fact-checkers.
"We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again," wrote Zuckerberg.
This news will likely fail to reassure many conservatives who still blame Zuckerberg personally for what transpired. But the evidence is now overwhelming that the federal pressure campaign—not the politics of the moderators themselves—was the most important reason for heavy-handed content suppression on social media sites. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court declined to remedy this situation and prohibit federal bureaucrats from jawboning the platforms.
This means that supporters of free speech will have to rely on the inclinations of the tech giants to stand up to the federal government. It's a very good thing, then, that Zuckerberg no longer wants his social media platform to be beholden to the White House.
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