This week, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. The Republican-led committee has been struggling for months to prove that Meta engaged in political obstruction by removing right-wing content through its eponymous Facebook app. Its investigation used thousands of documents and the committee interviewed multiple employees, but found no conclusive evidence. Now, under the guise of offering his own perspective on the matter, Zuckerberg’s letter is an admission of fault that suggests there was something to the Republican conspiracy theory.
Specifically, he said the Biden administration asked Meta to “censor some COVID-19-related content” in 2021. Meta did indeed remove the posts, but Zuckerberg now regrets the decision and acknowledged that the company made a mistake by removing some content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop after the FBI warned it might be Russian disinformation.
Besides the good-humored tone of the letter, what caught my attention was Zuckerberg’s use of the word “censorship.” The right has used the word for years to describe what they see as Facebook’s systematic suppression of conservative posts. Some state attorneys general have used the metaphor to argue that the company should regulate its content, and Florida and Texas have passed laws to do just that. Facebook has always argued that the First Amendment is about government oppression, and that by definition its content decisions should not be characterized as such. In fact, the Supreme Court has dismissed the case and blocked the law.
By using these words to describe the removal of coronavirus-related material, Zuckerberg appeared to backtrack. After years of arguing that social media companies’ content decisions don’t take away people’s First Amendment rights, rightly or wrongly, by making such decisions, the company is in fact call By violating the right to free speech, Zuckerberg is giving his conservative critics exactly what they wanted.
I asked Meta spokesman Andy Stone whether the company agrees with Republicans that some decisions to remove content could be called “censorship.” Stone said Zuckerberg used that word because he was referring to the government. But Stone also pointed to Zuckerberg’s assertion that the final decision to remove a post was Meta’s own. (In response to Zuckerberg’s letter, the White House said, “In the face of a deadly pandemic, this Administration has encouraged responsible action to protect public health and safety,” leaving the final decision up to Facebook.)
Meta can’t have both. The letter is clear: Zuckerberg said the government pressured Meta to “censor” coronavirus-related content. Meta removed that content. So Meta is now labeling some of its actions as censorship. Seizing on this, Republican members of the Judiciary Committee quickly tweeted that Zuckerberg had now unequivocally admitted that “Facebook has censored Americans.”
Stone said Meta still doesn’t think of itself as a censor. So is Meta taking issue with Republican tweets? Stone declined to comment. While Republicans and right-wing commentators brag that Facebook has admitted to blatantly censoring conservatives as a matter of policy, Meta doesn’t seem prepared to push back.
In his letter, the Meta CEO made another gift to Jordan and the Republican Party. It was about his personal philanthropy. During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg funded a bipartisan effort to protect people’s right to vote. Republicans criticized Zuckerberg’s efforts as helping Democrats. Zuckerberg still maintains that he is not advocating for people to vote a certain way, just allowing people to vote freely. But he wrote in his letter to Jordan that he recognizes that some people don’t believe him. So, to indulge his apparently ignorant or malicious critics, he now vows not to fund bipartisan voting efforts during this election cycle. “My goal is to be neutral and not to play or appear to play a role in either party,” he wrote.
