An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to nasty incidents of bullying on the internet.
An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and support, but it has at the same time led to nasty incidents of bullying on the internet.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.
“In 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.
In his communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our position has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and private entities should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.
Zuckerberg further noted in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”
Meta has since updated its policies and procedures 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 the year 2020 when he helped support “election infrastructure.”
“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg mentioned the 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 “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content 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, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing 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.”
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