Big Tech defends free speech amid government pressure

The long-standing tension between censorship versus safety online is coming to a head as CEOs start to publicly push back. Tech companies have corrected what they consider a content moderation overreach during the 2020 election and the pandemic. Ahead of the 2024 race, they are standing their ground.  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday accused Biden administration officials of pressuring Facebook to "censor certain content" related to COVID-19 and said he regrets not being more outspoken about it until now. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it," he wrote. His comments come in the wake of the arrest of Telegram's billionaire CEO and co-founder Pavel Durov, for what French authorities say is part of a criminal investigation related to illegal content shared on his platform.