The Patriot Post® · Zuckerberg Apologizes Again, but Will Anything Change?

Meta CEO and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg is promising his company won’t do what it did during both the 2020 presidential campaign and the 2022 midterm cycle: interfere. In a letter sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Zuckerberg writes, “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.”

Facebook and its parent company, Meta, have repeatedly been targets of the Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the weaponization of government against Americans. Zuckerberg himself and several Meta employees have testified before the committee.

Republicans on the committee have made the case that the Biden administration has repeatedly engaged in unconstitutional behavior in its efforts to censor and suppress the speech of Americans on social media platforms. (The Supreme Court effectively punted on the question.) Meanwhile, Democrat lawmakers have defended this behavior as supposedly protecting Americans from misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech, while at the same time seeking to deny that there was any infringement of First Amendment protections to free speech.

In his letter, Zuckerberg addresses three issues raised by conservatives as evidence that he and his company colluded with Democrats and furthered their political aims.

First, Zuckerberg acknowledges that his company did, in fact, face a pressure campaign from the Biden administration to censor speech. He writes:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our team 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 other words, Zuckerberg admits that what Republicans have long been contending is true: The Biden administration did push Big Tech companies to censor speech, including humor and satire. We have complained to Facebook and in numerous articles about our own content, primarily memes, facing this sort of censorship.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg owns up to the decision to give in to the administration’s pressure campaign, even acknowledging that it was wrong. The Democrats’ defense that this is not in violation of the First Amendment is laughable. The notion that the federal government would push a private company to censor speech is anathema to the whole principle of freedom of speech. Indeed, when it comes to speech, the government’s only concern should be ensuring that the First Amendment is being vigorously upheld. And if there is even a hint of governmental infringement upon Americans’ right to freely state their views, thoughts, and beliefs, those responsible should be quickly corrected or fired.

Second, Zuckerberg also acknowledges that during the 2020 election season, the FBI warned Meta about “a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma.” When the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped in the fall, Zuckerberg believed this to be precisely the incident the FBI had warned them about. Thus, he admitted, Facebook “temporarily demoted” the story and sent it to their army of “fact-checkers” to ascertain whether it was legit. He writes, “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.” You don’t say.

He also claims that since this episode, Meta has changed policies, and its moderators “no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.” But Zuckerberg still has that army of so-called “fact-checkers” who double as censorship police.

Furthermore, did Zuckerberg ever follow up with the FBI to ascertain whether the Hunter Biden laptop was the “Russian disinformation” it was warning about? If so, what did the FBI communicate to him? If Meta did contact the FBI and was told that this was misinformation, then it is the FBI knowingly manipulating Facebook to censor speech and influence an election. To put it mildly, that is a huge scandal.

Finally, Zuckerberg attempts to paint his massive pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote campaign as “designed to be non-partisan.” He writes: “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.” Here, “this cycle” seems to be an interesting caveat. If his intent was not to be partisan, then why add the caveat?

Zuckerberg has a long history of issuing apologies for his company’s actions, from misusing user data to implementing algorithms that exploit children to censoring users’ speech. Is this mea culpa any different? Or is this yet another instance of Zuckerberg sensing the changing cultural and political headwinds and adjusting in kind? Zuckerberg has certainly made some interesting statements of late, so perhaps he’s waking up to the threat of the woke mind virus.

Jonathan Turley is unconvinced, saying, “For free speech advocates, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It came after the House Judiciary Committee forced the release of the Facebook files. It had all of the genuine regret as a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim.”

Indeed, until fundamental changes are made, à la Elon Musk with X, the apologies will hold little weight.