Mark Zuckerberg’s election-season gift to Republicans
CNN
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Mark Zuckerberg is handing Republicans political victories ahead of the 2024 presidential election, acquiescing to years of GOP grievances over his company's policies.
In recent days, the Meta chief executive has made newsworthy public statements implicitly supporting right-wing "censorship" narratives and offered praise for Donald Trump as "badass", even as he claimed he wanted to appear "neutral" and nonpartisan.
On Monday, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the powerful House Judiciary Committee, stating that the Biden administration had "pressured" Meta to "censor" content during the pandemic.
"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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," Zuckerberg said.
The Meta chief added that the pressure he felt was "wrong" and he came to "regret" that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken.
The letter was immediately weaponized by Trump, who used it to once again promote the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
"Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!) IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED," he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday morning, after Zuckerberg's letter became public.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee also welcomed Zuckerberg's letter, posting a copy Monday on social media and using it to attack President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now running as the Democratic nominee for president. The letter was sent amid a two-year investigation by House Republicans into the content moderation policies of major social media networks.
"Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. Biden-Harris Admin ‘pressured' Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech," the committee wrote on X.
It's not uncommon for social media companies to reevaluate their approach to content moderation in the run-up to elections, and some experts now believe the companies may have overdone it at times in the 2020 cycle.
But the decision to make such a disclosure in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee is notable; the committee is chaired by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who has repeatedly pushed false rhetoric that the 2020 election was stolen and celebrated the dismantling of academic institutions dedicated to researching election misinformation.
Zuckerberg's decision to describe the White House's attempts to flag Covid misinformation as pressure and censorship came despite a 6-3 decision this summer by the Supreme Court ruling that the federal government had not overstepped by asking platforms to take down potential misinformation.
But Zuckerberg's letter publicly played into the hands of Republicans, who have long falsely claimed that social media platforms colluded with liberal government officials to censor conservative voices. There have been instances, as Zuckerberg has acknowledged, where platforms took down or reduced the spread of dangerous pandemic misinformation or blatant lies about elections, like incorrect locations of polling places, though that occurred under the Trump and Biden administrations.
In recent years, the platforms run by Zuckerberg and billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk have eliminated many of the guardrails designed to reduce the spread of viral misinformation, including allowing Trump to return after he was banned in the wake of the January 6 attack.
Zuckerberg, who previously donated more than $400 million to enhance access to voting in the US, also told Jordan that he would no longer support election efforts after coming under attack from Republicans, who have argued that the funds, derisively referred to as "Zuckerbucks," helped Biden win key battleground states.
"I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other," he wrote. "My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another - or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle."
As the Covid-19 pandemic depleted local resources during the 2020 election, private companies like Facebook stepped in to fill the coffers of election offices with these grants. With the explosion of mail-in voting during the pandemic, which requires more resources than in-person voting, counties across the country gladly welcomed the cash. But after Trump lost several key states and counties that took the money, Republicans used it as a scapegoat.
The decision to cut the funding was hailed as a victory by Republicans, with the judiciary committee celebrating the move.
The Meta chief also went a step further, telling the committee that the company's decision to briefly limit sharing of the New York Post's infamous October 2020 story on Hunter Biden's laptop was a mistake, a decision he has previously expressed regret over.
Zuckerberg said that it has "been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story."
But while the contents of the laptop that the Post reported on turned out to be authentic, according to the Justice Department, the New York Post's reporting in 2020 peddled a false narrative that was being simultaneously pushed by the Russian government. That false narrative claimed Joe Biden had "pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where his son was on the board.
Zuckerberg's letter comes just weeks after he told Bloomberg that Trump's reaction to an assassination attempt was "badass," even after the former president threatened to send the Meta chief to prison if reelected.
"Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life," he told Bloomberg.
Taken together, the remarks show Zuckerberg offering Republicans an olive branch ahead of the election, and some political ammunition to wit. In the Bloomberg interview, Zuckerberg said Meta had enacted changes to its platforms to reduce the amount of political content reaching users, though it remains unclear what meets that definition.
"I think you're going to see our services play less of a role in this election than they have in the past," he said.
