Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Comes Clean on Censorship During Covid

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

In a letter to the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan (R-OH), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret over his company’s censorship of user content during the pandemic.

The letter was dated August 26 and posted on Facebook.

“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,” Zuckerberg wrote. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former independent presidential candidate, who was a victim of Meta’s censorship on both Facebook and Meta-owned Instagram, responded to the news with good humor. He welcomed Zuckerberg into “the ranks of the crazed conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor dissent during Covid.”

This facetious remark is a reminder of Meta’s complicity in censoring Kennedy and thousands of others during the height of Covid. While several years too late, Zuckerberg appears contrite over his company’s ruthless censorship that benefited the powerful at the expense of citizens of the digital public square. 

Kennedy’s running mate and AI ethics pioneer, Nicole Shanahan, called on Zuckerberg to prove that his regrets will result in concrete action. “It's refreshing to see Zuck finally acknowledge what we've all known: censorship of free speech is fundamentally wrong,” Shanahan wrote. 

She added, “But let's be honest, words alone aren't enough. A real shift begins with transparency. Facebook can start by making every government contract and request for speech suppression public and open source. Nothing should be hidden.”

According to documents presented to U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta has a long history of censoring Kennedy at the behest of the Biden administration. Evidence seen by the court as part of the Kennedy v. Biden lawsuit also demonstrated that this censorship is ongoing, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon. 

In his letter, Zuckerberg revealed, “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today.” 

Too little too late.

Zuckerberg’s letter also expressed regret over Facebook’s suppression of a 2020 New York Post article detailing the contents of the hard drive from President Biden’s son Hunter's laptop. At the time, the FBI deceived Meta, alleging the laptop story was part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” 

In addressing criticism that his donations, through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to election infrastructure in 2020, benefited Democrats, the Meta CEO said, “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another —or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.” 

Since 2020, X (formerly known as Twitter) has been taken private by free speech advocate Elon Musk. The popularity of video streaming platform, Rumble, has also become a bastion of free speech. 

The political tide has also turned. Diverse political figures – from Donald Trump to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Tulsi Gabbard to Vivek Ramaswamy – have all spoken out against the Biden administration’s addiction to censorship. 

Has this tide truly swayed Zuckerberg? Will Meta make fundamental changes to its algorithms so that both Facebook and Instagram are friendly to all forms of speech? Or is the latest from Zuckerberg merely a gesture of political expediency?

Time will tell – but if the past is prologue, Zuckerberg as a card-carrying member of the National Coalition Against Censorship seems far-fetched.