An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.

An emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was influenced by the Biden administration in 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he felt in 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he 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 comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our position has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election.

That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

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

Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

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

“The goal here was to make sure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

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

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community 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 ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case accusing the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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