Biden/Harris Pressuring Mark Zuckerberg To Censor COVID Content Is Unforgivable | Burack

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Meta in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19.

"Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our team for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our team when we didn't agree," he wrote to Republican House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan.

Zuckerberg says he regrets not pushing back. 

"I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken," Zuckerberg wrote.

"Like I said 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," he continued.

"Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role." 

This is not the first time Zuckerberg admitted to the government influencing editorial decisions at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

In 2022, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook buried the Hunter Biden laptop story on behalf of the FBI, which had forewarned of incoming Russian propaganda weeks prior.

"Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant," Zuckerberg said.

"We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement. They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something. Then I wanna take that seriously," he added.

Last November, the House Judiciary Committee filed a 103-page staff interim report detailing how government agencies pressured Facebook (and Twitter) to suppress certain information ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The finding discovered "hundreds" of reports showing how the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of State, and Stanford University assisted in the creation of a secret "disinformation" group that asked social media companies to "censor true information, jokes, and political opinions."

The pressure campaign disproportionately resulted in the de-platforming of information disfavorable to Democrats, per the report.

There's a pattern.

Defenders of censorship have long touted Facebook as a "private company" that need not abide by the First Amendment. That's true. Sort of.

The government cannot legally censor Americans per the First Amendment. However, what we have here is the government trying to subvert the Constitution via a third party, as in Facebook.

A Wall Street Journal legal analysis from 2022 explained that a tech company censoring users at the government's behest is no longer acting as a "private company" but instead a "state actor" and can be sued as such.

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro drew the same conclusion in an interview with OutKick in 2021.

"The Democrats should not be pressuring Facebook to take down information. Stop that now. The fact that you now have the media and the Democrats pushing to police Facebook is ugly authoritarianism," said Shapiro.

"We need to be pushing back on that level because that actually is, in some cases, government-sponsored action. We have the White House telling Facebook to take things down. Now you're looking at Facebook as an agent of the government. That's a First Amendment case. Stop that now. That's where we need to be fighting."

And we need to fight harder.

The foremost right of every American is their right to speak, to speak out against the government. One cannot call themselves an American if they do not have that right. 

Government-induced censorship is a direct threat to our ability to live our lives as Americans. Government-induced censorship is unforgivable.

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former member of the Democratic Party always says, censorship is the first step toward totalitarianism. Mark Zuckerberg's letter to Congress reads like he's a shameful enabler of totalitarianism.

Keep that in mind come November.