Meta Platforms CEO Officer Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that Fb was “pressured” by the US authorities to censor content material associated to Covid-19 through the international pandemic and that he regrets the corporate’s resolution to accede to the calls for.
“In 2021, senior officers from the Biden administration, together with the White Home, repeatedly pressured our groups for months to censor sure Covid-19 content material, together with humour and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the committee on the judiciary of the US home of representatives.
And whereas it was Meta’s resolution whether or not to take away content material, he wrote, “the federal government strain was mistaken, and I remorse that we weren’t extra outspoken about it”.
Throughout the pandemic, Fb officers drew ire from critics of lockdowns, vaccines and masking mandates as a result of it eliminated sure posts, saying they contained misinformation associated to the virus or in any other case went in opposition to its insurance policies.
In all, Fb took down greater than 20 million items of content material in simply over a yr. Zuckerberg joined different social media executives, together with Jack Dorsey, former CEO of running a blog platform Twitter, in lamenting previous cases of content material moderation that, of their view, went too far.
There’s a rising international debate over how far social media corporations ought to go in policing the feedback, photos and different content material posted by their customers. Some platforms consider they need to be palms off on the subject of telling customers what they will and might’t say on-line, whereas some governments say that an excessively laissez-faire stance can beget felony behaviour.
Telegram arrest
French officers arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov on the weekend, alleging that the corporate did not adequately fight crime on the messaging app, together with the unfold of kid sexual abuse materials.
On the eve of the US presidential election, pitting vice President Kamala Harris in opposition to former president Donald Trump, Zuckerberg can be taking pains to look non-partisan.
“My aim is to be impartial and never play a task a method or one other — or to even look like enjoying a task,” Zuckerberg wrote within the letter, the content material of which was posted to the Fb web page of the judiciary committee and confirmed by Meta. He was writing in reference to contributions made within the final presidential cycle to help electoral infrastructure. — (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP
