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Mark Zuckerberg regrets not pushing back on Biden’s COVID “pressure” campaign

Mark Zuckerberg regrets not pushing back on Biden’s COVID “pressure” campaign

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, on Thursday, July 18, 2024. Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. debuted a new and powerful AI model, called Llama 3.1, that Zuckerberg called "state of the art" and said will rival similar offerings from competitors. Photographer: Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

After years of bickering with the Biden administration about vaccine misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has now accused the White House of “repeatedly” pressuring Facebook for months “to censor certain COVID-19 content” in 2021 that Facebook supposedly would not have taken down without pressure.

In a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Monday, the Meta CEO claimed that senior officials from the Biden administration “expressed a lot of frustration” when Facebook pushed back on certain content removal requests. According to Zuckerberg, the Biden administration didn’t just want misinformation taken down, but also “humor and satire.”

“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the 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, taking accountability for his platform’s actions.

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