Mark Zuckerberg just had to eat several large helpings of crow.
And some minor political flap wasn’t on the menu.
As the Wall Street Journal first reported, the CEO of Facebook and Meta expressed regret on such weighty matters as government-induced censorship and free speech.
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It’s good for Zuck to accept some degree of responsibility, but it’s kinda too late. By about three years.
The admissions came in a letter to Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman, and is a major win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz kid usually digs in defensively, with vague promises of future reform.
After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White House officials had "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."
That is an important distinction. The Biden pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could, and sometimes did, say no. But much of the time, the giant social media site just caved.
And Facebook had a publicly proclaimed agenda: prodding millions of people to take Covid vaccines.
Zuckerberg said the administration pressure "was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it." His company "made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today…I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again."
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I don’t know: How confident are you that Facebook would publicly push back on some hot-button issue today?
A Biden White House spokesman, in lawyerly language that didn’t quite respond to Zuck’s accusations, said it had "encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety…Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."
Two years ago, a Free Press reporter who examined the "Twitter Files" found that both the Trump and the Biden administrations "directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes."
One document mentioned the White House chief technology officer, who "led the Trump administration's calls for help from the tech companies to combat misinformation."
The piece also said that Facebook, Google and Microsoft joined in "weekly" calls with the Trump officials to talk about "general trends" at the companies. Sounds euphemistic.
But Trump was also a victim. Just four hours after a 2020 campaign video was posted and drew a half million views, Facebook took it down, saying it violated the social network’s policy against Covid misinformation.
The Trump camp had posted a clip from a Fox interview in which the president said children were "virtually immune" from the coronavirus. Most medical experts disagreed at the time.
"They’ve got much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this," Trump said. "They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem."
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A White House spokeswoman at the time called the move "another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction."
Zuckerberg, for his part, also made news on the Hunter Biden laptop.
He told Jordan that Meta "shouldn’t have demoted" a New York Post story about the laptop shortly before the 2020 election.
Let me stop right there. Demoted is tech jargon for suppressing a story, blatantly burying it so that few if any users see it. This happened after Twitter, as you’ll recall, totally blocked the Post story.
Trump allies got access to the laptop from the Delaware computer shop owner, at a time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter dismissing the laptop story as fake, and in a debate with Trump, Biden said the release of the emails had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
Zuckerberg writes: "It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story."
Right. And it took the New York Times and Washington Post another year and a half to "authenticate" the laptop’s contents.
In the 2020 election, Zuck funded nonprofits to set up Covid-era voting booths and equipment sorting mail-in ballots, which Republicans, calling it "Zuckerbucks," argued with some justification that this unfairly benefited Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he won’t repeat the effort this time.
Trump said in a posting last month: "All I can say is that if I'm elected president, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time. We already know who you are. DON'T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!"
In his Mar-a-Lago interview with me, Trump made his distaste for Facebook quite clear, in fact using it to justify dropping his opposition to banning TikTok, saying that would only help Zuckerberg’s company.
Now some may dismiss all this as old news, given that the events date to the pandemic and the last election. But it raises fundamental questions that continue to reverberate today, when Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump has prompted many liberals to leave or largely abandon X and join Threads, the Zuckerberg copycat site.
Politicians and special interests routinely lobby the federal government. But when they use their considerable clout to pressure tech giants – secretly, behind closed doors, shielded from the public – it is deeply troubling.
