Mark Zuckerberg Says White House Was ‘Wrong’ to Pressure Facebook on COVID

In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) that touched on a series of controversies, Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was improper for the Biden administration to have pressured Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the coronavirus pandemic, vowing that the social-media company would reject any such future efforts. Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, 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.” At the time, Facebook’s publicly stated goal was to push millions of people toward Covid-19 vaccines. In his letter, Zuckerberg didn’t indicate whether he had changed his mind about that goal or whether he simply felt that the Biden administration had gone too far. Administration officials feared at the time that many Americans were hesitant to get vaccines because of false information they saw on Facebook. Zuckerberg also said he didn’t plan to repeat efforts to fund nonprofits to assist in state election efforts, a Covid-era push that had drawn Republican criticism and sparked many Republican-leaning states to ban the practice.