The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks online.
The emotional exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked ugly bullying attacks online.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that his company was pressured by the White House in the year 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.
“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for months to remove some content about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” he wrote.
President Biden remarked in July 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg also noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the 2020 election.
That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meta has since changed its policies and processes to “ensure this does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.
In the communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He stated his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to censor Americans, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has sought to close the gap between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he maintained that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are globally located and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37 |
38 |
39 |
40 |
41 |
42 |
43 |
44 |
45 |
46 |
47 |
48 |
49 |
50 |
51 |
52 |
53 |
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 |
58 |
59 |
60 |
61 |
62 |
63 |
64 |
65 |
66 |
67 |