In a letter to Representative Jim Jordan, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has apologized for his company’s decision to play along with the many requests for censorship that were made by the Biden administration during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee, “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.”
In June, in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on whether the Biden administration’s conduct had been unconstitutional. Irrespective, its behavior represents one of the worst political scandals of recent years. Per Zuckerberg, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook and Instagram to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire” and “expressed a lot of frustration” in the rare cases that it demurred. That, clearly, is not how the federal government should be behaving toward the free speech of its citizens. That those demands were made — and that resistance to them was treated as it was — is a sign that something went very wrong.
In a statement, the White House pointed to the existence of a “deadly pandemic” and cast its actions as having protected “public health and safety.” “We believe,” the administration submitted, that “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.” But, as Mark Zuckerberg confirmed, the Biden team’s habit went far beyond a desire to save lives. Confirming that Facebook had throttled accurate reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg apologized for that, too. “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” What, one wonders, would the Biden campaign claim was its unselfish justification for that?
Whether Zuckerberg’s words are worth anything remains to be seen. In his letter, he says that he feels “strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction” and insists that Meta is “ready to push back if something like this happens again.” But that is always easier to say outside of a crisis than within one. Now, it is helpful for Zuckerberg to side with free expression. Three years ago, it was not. Then, he and his employees were being accused of murder, genocide, human sacrifice, and granny-killing, and the Hunter Biden story was being cynically transmuted into dangerous “Russian disinformation.” If, indeed, “something like this happens again,” all of those tactics will immediately return. Is Zuckerberg ready and willing to ignore them?
That the Supreme Court has not laid down a set of rules that would prevent a repeat performance is regrettable. But it should not be the end of the story. Facebook is a private company. Its site is not public property but a private space, and beyond its obligation to remain in compliance with the law, Facebook is (and it should continue to be) free to take down posts for any reason it likes. We may not always like the results, but a respect for private property is, like an aversion to state censorship, a fundamental American principle. Technically, the decision to take down a post remained Facebook’s despite the pressure from the administration. Nevertheless, “requests” from the White House can be extraordinarily persuasive. Should it so wish, Congress could pass a law that established some boundaries that limit the extent to which the executive should be allowed to exert pressure on a social-media company to delete posts with which it is unhappy — or, at the very least, that mandated real-time transparency from all in the government who are involved. It would be nice to think that Mark Zuckerberg has truly found religion on the matter of free speech, but, on the off chance that he has not, our legislators ought to do the spadework for him and ensure that, next time an American president tries to bully a social-media company into regulating jokes, we don’t have to wait three long years to find out about it.