The heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.
The heartfelt moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of praise and approval, but it has at the same time led to nasty bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration in the year 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, including satirical and humorous posts.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, such as the administration, constantly urged our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the 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. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – 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 platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated 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 encouraging “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 also mentioned in the letter that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said 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 “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the communication to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “electoral 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 mentioned the initiatives were designed to be nonpartisan but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “impartial” 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 censor Americans, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in the past years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged 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 based worldwide 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.
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 experience harm 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 |