Letter To House Judiciary Committee (08.26.2024 - E-Signature)
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Breitbart NewsLetter To House Judiciary Committee (08.26.2024 - E-Signature)
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Menlo Park, CA 94025
United States
August 26, 2024
The Honorable Jim Jordan
Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
United States House of Representatives
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Chairman Jordan:
I appreciate the Committee's interest in content moderation on online platforms. As you are aware,
Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen
employees available for transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation, I
welcome the opportunity to share what I've taken away from this process.
* * *
There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and
I want to be clear about our position. Our platforms are for everyone -- we're about promoting speech
and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from
governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public
safety.
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. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not
to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to
our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I
regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with
the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. Like I said to our teams at
the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from
any Administration in either direction -- and we're ready to push back if something like this happens
again.
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about
the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York
Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe
Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting
for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in
retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make
sure this doesn't happen again -- for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S.
while waiting for fact-checkers.
Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential
cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across
the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made
these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan --
spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I've seen showing
otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is
to be neutral and not play a role one way or another -- or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don't
plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Respectfully,
/s/ Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Meta Platforms, Inc.
