Zuckerberg concedes to Biden administration pressure and removes content.

Mark Zuckerberg just had to eat several large helpings of crow.

And some minor political flap wasn’t on the menu.

The CEO of Facebook and Meta has expressed regret over government-induced censorship and free speech.

Although it's good for Zuck to take some responsibility, it's already been about three years.

The admissions letter to Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman, is a major win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz kid usually digs in defensively, with vague promises of future reform.

Zuckerberg stated that the senior Biden administration and White House officials had been urging his team to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, for months, and had expressed a lot of frustration when his team did not comply.

Facebook often caved to Biden's pressure tactics, although it sometimes said no.

Facebook's public agenda was to encourage millions of people to get vaccinated against Covid.

Zuckerberg stated that the administration pressure was incorrect, and he regrets not being more vocal about it. His company made choices that, with hindsight and new information, they would not make today. Zuckerberg emphasized that they should not compromise their content standards due to pressure from any administration, and they are prepared to push back if it happens again.

What is your level of confidence that Facebook will publicly address a controversial issue today?

The Biden White House spokesman responded to Zuck's accusations in a lawyerly manner, stating that they had "encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety." They emphasized that their position has been clear and consistent, adding that they believe tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the American people while making independent choices about the information they present.

In 2019, a Free Press journalist discovered that both the Trump and Biden administrations urged Twitter executives to regulate the platform's pandemic-related content in accordance with their preferences.

The Trump administration's calls for help from tech companies to combat misinformation were led by the White House chief technology officer.

The piece reported that Facebook, Google, and Microsoft participated in "weekly" meetings with Trump officials to discuss "general trends" at their companies. This phrasing may be seen as vague or evasive.

Facebook removed a 2020 campaign video that received 500,000 views, claiming it violated the platform's policy on Covid misinformation.

At the time of the interview, most medical experts disagreed with the president's statement that children were "virtually immune" to the coronavirus.

"Trump stated that they have stronger immune systems than us somehow due to this."

The White House spokeswoman characterized the move as "another example of Silicon Valley's blatant bias against this president, with the rules being applied only one-sidedly."

In addition to Zuckerberg, news about the Hunter Biden laptop also emerged.

He informed Jordan that Meta "should not have demoted" a New York Post story about the laptop prior to the 2020 election.

The term "demoted" in tech jargon refers to the act of burying a story so that it is not visible to many users. This occurred after Twitter blocked the Post story.

The Delaware computer shop owner provided access to Trump allies to the laptop at the time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. A group of former intelligence officials wrote a letter stating that the laptop story was false. In a debate with Trump, Biden said that the release of the emails had the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.

Zuckerberg acknowledges that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and regrets demoting the story.

It took the New York Times and Washington Post another year and a half to verify the laptop's contents.

In the 2020 election, Zuckerberg funded nonprofits to set up Covid-era voting booths and equipment sorting mail-in ballots, which some Republicans argued was unfairly beneficial to Democratic areas. Zuckerberg has now stated that he will not repeat the effort in the upcoming election.

Trump stated in a recent post that if he becomes president, he will relentlessly pursue election fraudsters and send them to prison for extended periods. He added that he already knows who they are and warned them not to act again. He also addressed Zuckerbucks, urging them to exercise caution.

Trump expressed his dislike for Facebook during our Mar-a-Lago interview, using it as a reason to abandon his opposition to banning TikTok, which he believed would benefit Zuckerberg's company.

Although the events occurred during the pandemic and the previous election, the endorsement of Trump by Elon Musk has led many liberals to depart from X and migrate to Threads, a Zuckerberg-inspired platform. This raises fundamental questions that persist today.

The use of clout by politicians and special interests to pressure tech giants in secret, behind closed doors, is deeply troubling.