The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.

The emotional moment between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has triggered a wave of admiration and approval, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was pressured by the White House in the year 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for an extended period to censor certain COVID-19 content, such as satirical content, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the pressure he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. Zuckerberg further stated that with the “hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” 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 letter, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe 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 mentioned in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “been made 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 “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the necessary resources to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the narrative has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media company and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held 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 based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the claimants in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no legal standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near 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 request a preliminary injunction.”
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