Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a surprise letter to House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), for the first time publicly regretting caving into pressure from the Biden Administration to censor so-called misinformation about COVID-19 and election issues, including “humor and satire,” from Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg also regretted the Hunter Biden laptop censorship fiasco.
CNN editor Jon Passantino, under an unusual solo byline at CNN.com reduced the vital free-speech question to the image of Zuckerberg virtually donning a MAGA hat for Trump 2024, for the crime of admitting he shouldn’t have been such a passive tool for Democratic-prodded censorship in 2020: “Mark Zuckerberg’s election-season gift to Republicans.”
(He wasn't alone: Deadline.com posted the headline "Mark Zuckerberg Says Biden Administration Pressured Meta To Censor Covid Content, In Gift To House Republicans.")
The report from petulant Passantino, editor of CNN’s slanted media newsletter Reliable Sources (now on hiatus), condemned Zuckerberg for giving aid and comfort to enemy Republicans.
Note what words he puts in scare quotes.
Mark Zuckerberg is handing Republicans political victories ahead of the 2024 presidential election, acquiescing to years of GOP grievances over his company’s policies.
In recent days, the Meta chief executive has made newsworthy public statements implicitly supporting right-wing “censorship” narratives and offered praise for Donald Trump as “badass” – even as he claimed he wanted to appear “neutral” and nonpartisan.
(Passantino belatedly described the “badass” comment in its non-partisan context, quoting what Zuckerberg told Bloomberg: “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”)
On Monday, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the powerful House Judiciary Committee, stating that the Biden administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” content during the pandemic.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said.
What mild criticism Passantino offered was brief, passively couched, and blamed only the social media companies, not the Biden administration.
It’s not uncommon for social media companies to reevaluate their approach to content moderation in the run-up to elections, and some experts now believe the companies may have overdone it at times in the 2020 cycle.
Passantino treated the very term “censorship” as dubious.
But the decision to make such a disclosure in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee is notable; the committee is chaired by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who has repeatedly pushed false rhetoric that the 2020 election was stolen and celebrated the dismantling of academic institutions dedicated to researching election misinformation.
Does anyone seriously think left-wing academics would treat conservative viewpoints fairly if they had the power to squelch them instead?
Zuckerberg’s decision to describe the White House’s attempts to flag Covid misinformation as pressure and censorship came despite a 6-3 decision this summer by the Supreme Court ruling that the federal government had not overstepped by asking platforms to take down potential misinformation.
But Zuckerberg’s letter publicly played into the hands of Republicans, who have long falsely claimed that social media platforms colluded with liberal government officials to censor conservative voices….
(MRC's Free Speech America project would beg to differ.)
He even defended the censoring, a few weeks before the 2020 Trump-Biden match, of a legitimate news story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Passantino shifted the subject to the New York Post having allegedly assisted a Russian narrative:
But while the contents of the laptop that the Post reported on turned out to be authentic, according to the Justice Department, the New York Post’s reporting in 2020 peddled a false narrative that was being simultaneously pushed by the Russian government. That false narrative claimed Joe Biden had “pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating” the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where his son was on the board.
Reason writer Jesse Walker found Passantino’s article “terrible,” writing on X: "It's not easy to follow the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of this terrible article, but I think it boils down to ‘You shouldn't reveal true information because it might be used to bolster claims that aren't true.’”
