An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and approval, but it has also led to nasty incidents of bullying online.
An heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has triggered a flood of praise and approval, but it has also led to nasty incidents of bullying online.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg revealed 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 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, such as 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 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned 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, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks 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 posted on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and other private actors 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 spokesperson.
Zuckerberg further noted in the communication that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post alleging the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess 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 changed its policies and processes to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “neutral” so will not be “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 pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media company 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 ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located 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 of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near 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.”
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37 |
38 |
39 |
40 |
41 |
42 |
43 |
44 |
45 |
46 |
47 |
48 |
49 |
50 |
51 |
52 |
53 |
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 |
58 |
59 |
60 |
61 |
62 |
63 |
64 |
65 |
66 |
67 |