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- Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration’s pressure to remove COVID-19-related content was wrong.
- In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, he said his goal is to be politically neutral.
- He also said he won’t donate to support election infrastructure in 2024.
It appears that there’s still some tension between Mark Zuckerberg and government officials despite the Meta CEO’s desire to remain “neutral.”
In a letter sent Monday to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO recalled a moment when he felt pressured by the White House.
Zuckerberg said in 2021 the Biden administration repeatedly pressured Meta to remove content related to COVID-19 and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company did not agree.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
He added, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Internal Meta emails obtained by the Journal last year previously showed the company had removed content related to COVID-19 after pressure from the White House.
Still, Zuckerberg maintained that he wanted Meta to abstain from endorsing a presidential candidate.
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg said that, unlike the last presidential election, he does not plan to donate to support election infrastructure in 2024. In 2020, he and his wife donated $400 million to nonpartisan organizations helping run elections during the pandemic. Republicans branded them “Zuckerbucks” and claimed that they benefited Democrats in the election.
“They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” he wrote.
Though the donations have long been controversial, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May found private donations, like Zuckerberg’s, did not advantage Democrats.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta’s content moderation, an issue Jordan and other Republicans have been highly critical of, accusing the social media platform of censoring conservative viewpoints.
In 2023, Jordan threatened to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress for not providing documents related to censorship of conservative viewpoints.
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that in 2020, Meta suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while waiting for fact-checking to investigate, adding, “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
He said the company changed its processes to prevent this from happening again, such as no longer demoting stories while waiting for a fact-check.
Meta declined to comment when reached by BI.