Meta’s CEO admitted in a letter to Congress that Facebook censored factual information under pressure from the Biden administration.
In a letter dated August 26 to the Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Jordan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that Facebook had inappropriately censored users’ posts at the request of the Biden administration.
The letter states that, “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, 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.”
While saying that the decision whether to censor was ultimately Meta’s, he expressed regret about caving to pressure from the White House. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he wrote, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
He added that Meta was “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Zuckerberg also admitted to having wrongly censored a New York Post article from October 2020 reporting on emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, indicating that he arranged a meeting between his father, who was then Vice President, and an adviser to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter was a board member.
Less than a year after that meeting, Joe Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company, afterward publicly bragging about having done so at a videotaped meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The New York Post story about corruption and influence-peddling was dismissed by Democrats as “Russian disinformation”. More than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter characterizing the story as “a Russian information operation” aimed at “trying to influence how Americans vote” in the following month’s presidential election, and Politico and other mainstream media outlets ran with that narrative. Facebook censored the New York Post story, and Twitter went so far as to suspend the Post’s account.
The contents of the laptop were subsequently verified as authentic, and it was also later revealed that some of the former intelligence officials who signed the letter were CIA contractors and that the letter was written at the behest of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Thus, true information was censored on social media and the claim of “Russian disinformation” aimed at influencing the election outcome was itself a disinformation campaign emanating from the Democratic establishment in collusion with the Deep State to influence the election in Biden’s favor.
Zuckerberg acknowledged in his letter to the House Committee, “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the single greatest purveyor of disinformation was the US government itself, such as the big lie that two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine would confer durable sterilizing immunity that would enable the population to reach herd immunity by stopping infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
As I and others were pointing out at the time, there was no scientific evidence to support that claim as the clinical trials were not designed to determine these pharmaceutical products’ effectiveness against infection and transmission.
Dr. Deboarah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, later admitted to Congress that the false claim upon which the vaccines were sold to the public was not based on scientific evidence but rather “hope”. Dr. Rochelle Walensky likewise later admitted that the claim was not science-based but faith-based.
I discussed how factually accurate information about COVID-19, the lockdowns, and the vaccines was being censored by social media companies in order to facilitate the propagation of official government disinformation on The Tom Woods Show in February 2021.