Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was urged by the Biden administration in 2021 to restrict content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and private entities should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we should not have reduced its visibility.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are globally located and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

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