The US administration has demanded that Facebook censor posts about the coronavirus and is angry that the company has refused to do so, Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to a House committee.
Photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images
Meta Corporation CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company is under pressure from the White House during the COVID-19 pandemic. Senior officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration have demanded that certain coronavirus-related content be “censored” on Facebook, he told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in a memo released on Tuesday (August 27) in his letter.
Zuckerberg said officials have been asking Facebook for months to remove or limit “certain content related to COVID-19, including humor and sarcasm.” When the company refused to do so, “they protested vehemently,” he added.
Zuckerberg vowed to fight back against government pressure
“I think the government pressure was wrong and I’m sorry we didn’t talk about it more,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Aug. 26 letter, also on his X page.
The Meta boss admitted that some of his corporation’s decisions in this regard may have been wrong, and promised that the company would fight such pressure in the future.
In August 2021, Meta Corporation announced that it would delete more than 20 million posts on its social networks Facebook and Instagram due to misinformation about COVID-19. In addition, hundreds of accounts suspected of spreading vaccine hoaxes were reportedly deleted.
