The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown gargantuan debates and controversies on the aspect of social media censorship, especially on the then Facebook, now Meta. Central to these discussions remain the role of Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and that of the Biden-Harris administration in guiding or influencing moderation of content about the pandemic.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, have been at the front line when it comes to fighting misinformation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. False information regarding the virus, vaccines, and public health measures has posed tremendous risks to public safety.
Mack Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and Instagram says he regrets working with the Biden-Harris administration to censor information online during COVID. He says Biden pressured him. PIC.TWITTER.COM/JUPSV5UMUR
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All of these platforms responded to the deployment of strict policies about content moderation to lower the effective presence of misinformation. In fact, Facebook worked in direct accordance with the guidelines of health organizations such as the WHO and CDC, removing and flagging false claims that may pose a public health hazard.
These efforts, however, have come under both praise and criticism. As much as some hailed these efforts towards ensuring that accurate information was being imparted, others ensured concerns about ramifications on free speech and overreach by social media firms in their control of public discourse.
The influence the government has exerted, or can exert, on the social media process of moderation has been one of the hot topics. Exposés accused administration officials of the Biden-Harris administration of direct correspondence with social media companies-like Facebook-to take action against COVID-19 misinformation. These allegations raise debates around possible government overreach and infringement of First Amendment rights.
For instance, in July 2021, at the behest of an administration that remained the White House, Press Secretary Jen Psaki declared they had alerted Facebook to posts that they believed contained disinformation. This statement did little to quell concerns of several groups worried that the government was trying to strong-arm social media companies into censoring certain types of speech—an impossible tightrope walk between the pens of misinformation and free speech.
Through the course of the pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg made clear that Facebook needed to strike a balance between issues of the imperative of free expression and the responsibility to prevent harms caused by misinformation, specifically concerning health-related falsehoods. On multiple occasions before Congress and various interviews with the press, he indicated that, while the platform was designed to promote free speech, the company also had a duty to prevent harmful behavior from afflicting its millions of users.
With this clear attitude toward the content moderation policies of the company, there is no evidence that Zuckerberg has expressed any kind of regret over Facebook’s collaboration with the Biden administration, nor did he feel its pressure upon him to censor the content. In all his utterances, he has always spoken to underscore the heavy uphill task of managing the content of a global platform without directly touching on any regrets or pressures from the administration’s efforts.
