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In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg revealed the demands put forth by the White House and regretted complying with them Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the US government had pressured his company to censor content related to COVID-19 at the peak of the global pandemic. The billionaire said he regretted the company's decision to comply with the demands. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg revealed the demands put forth by the White House. "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 humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," said Zuckerberg in the letter. "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," the letter further read. During the pandemic, Facebook and other Meta platforms drew ire from critics worldwide for pushing lockdown, vaccine and mask mandates. Contrary viewpoints were actively censored as Meta claimed they contained misinformation related to the virus. According to reports, Facebook took down more than 20 million pieces of content in just over a year, related to COVID-19. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today," said Zuckerberg. "Like I said to our teams at the time, 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," he added. Watch | Mark Zuckerberg loses $3 billion after Meta outage Apart from censoring COVID-19 posts, Meta also buried the Hunter Biden laptop story, as confirmed by Zuckerberg in the letter himself. According to him, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had approached Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burism before the 2020 presidential election. "That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply," Zuckerberg said. Also read | Hunter Biden sought father Joe Biden's influence to help land 'lucrative' energy deal: Report "It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story." Meta demoting the story allowed Joe Biden to carry on his presidential campaign unperturbed which in hindsight, may have cost him dearly if the report was allowed to remain at the forefront of the social media platform. (With inputs from agencies) Football. Geopolitics. Cricket. Music. F1. In no particular order. None
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