This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, through its once eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by removing right-wing content. Its investigation involved thousands of documents and the commission interviewed numerous officials who failed to find a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his opinion on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there is something to the GOP conspiracy theory.
Specifically, he said that in 2021 the Biden administration has asked Meta to “censor some of the content related to Covid”. Meta did take down the posts and now Zuckerberg is regretting the decision. He also acknowledged that it was wrong to remove some of the content about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the company did after the FBI warned that the reports could be Russian disinformation.
What struck me, aside from the glossy tone of the letter, was how Zuckerberg used the word “censor.” For years, the right has used the word to describe what it sees as Facebook’s systematic suppression of conservative posts. Some state attorneys general have even used this trope to argue that the company’s content should be regulated, and Florida and Texas have passed laws to do just that. Facebook has always argued that the First Amendment is for government suppression, and by definition its content decisions cannot be characterized as such. In effect, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits and blocked the laws.
Now, by using that term to describe the removal of Covid material, Zuckerberg appears to be backing down. After years of insisting that, rightly or wrongly, a social media company’s content decisions don’t deprive people of their First Amendment rights — and actually saying that by making such decisions, the company is a summons his free speech rights – Zuckerberg is now giving his conservative critics exactly what they wanted.
I asked Meta spokesperson Andy Stone if the company now agrees with the GOP that some of its decisions to remove content can be called “censorship.” Stone said Zuckerberg was referring to the government when he used the term. But he also pointed me to Zuckerberg’s confirmation that the ultimate decision to remove posts rests with Meta. (In response to Zuckerberg’s letter, the White House said, “When faced with a deadly pandemic, this administration has encouraged responsible action to protect public health and safety,” and left the final decision to Facebook.)
Meta can’t have it both ways. The letter is clear – Zuckerberg said the government pressured Meta to “censor” some of the Covid content. Meta has removed this material. Consequently, Meta now characterizes some of its own actions as censorship. Taking advantage of this, GOP members of the Judiciary Committee quickly tweeted that Zuckerberg had now outright admitted that “Facebook censored Americans.”
