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Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was urged by the White House in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the administration, constantly urged our teams for an extended period Trolls On Social Media to censor some content about COVID-19, such as 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 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 ADHD and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media Self-advocacy platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, 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 actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our position has been consistent and clear: we Anxiety think tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI warned his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his Emotional Moment team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will Viral Video no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the Online Bullying initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He stated his goal is to be “neutral” so will not be “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 restrict American content, Facebook censored Viral Moment Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by Gus Walz the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to bridge the divide between his social media company and regulators to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content Social Media Criticism moderators, many of whom are contractors, 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 accusing the federal government of suppressing Empathy conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish 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.”