An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
An heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time led to ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was pressured by the Biden administration in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.
“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, such as the administration, 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 did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. He added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe 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, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”
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 think tech companies and other private actors 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 White House representative.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
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 communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “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 pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.
In addition, he stated 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 victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm 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.”
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37 |
38 |
39 |
40 |
41 |
42 |
43 |
44 |
45 |
46 |
47 |
48 |
49 |
50 |
51 |
52 |
53 |
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 |
58 |
59 |
60 |
61 |
62 |
63 |
64 |
65 |
66 |
67 |