Mark Zuckerberg's election gift to the Republicans

CNN
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Mark Zuckerberg is handing Republicans political victories ahead of the 2024 presidential election, giving in to years of Republican discontent over his company's policies.

In recent days, Meta's CEO has made eye-catching public statements implicitly supporting right-wing “censorship” theories and praising Donald Trump as a “tough guy” – even as he himself claimed he wanted to appear “neutral” and non-partisan.

On Monday, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the powerful House Judiciary Committee saying the Biden administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” content during the pandemic.

“For months in 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed deep frustration with our teams when we did not agree,” Zuckerberg said.

The Meta boss added that the pressure he felt was “wrong” and that he “regretted” that his company, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had not been more open about its opinions.

Trump immediately weaponized the letter, using it to once again spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

“Zuckerberg admits the White House pushed to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story (and much more!). In other words, the 2020 presidential election was rigged,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday morning after Zuckerberg's letter became public.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee also welcomed Zuckerberg's letter, posting a copy on social media on Monday and using it to attack President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee. The letter was sent amid a two-year investigation by House Republicans into the content moderation policies of major social networks.

“Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things: 1. The Biden-Harris administration 'pressured' Facebook to censor Americans. 2. Facebook censored Americans. 3. Facebook took down the Hunter Biden laptop story. A major victory for free speech,” the committee wrote on X.

It's common for social media companies to rethink their content moderation practices in the run-up to elections, and some experts now believe the companies may have overstepped their bounds at times during the 2020 election cycle.

Yet the decision to make such a disclosure in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee is notable; the committee is chaired by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who has repeatedly spread false rhetoric that the 2020 election was stolen and celebrated the dissolution of academic institutions dedicated to researching voter fraud.

Zuckerberg's decision to label the White House's attempts to label Covid misinformation as pressure and censorship came despite a 6-3 Supreme Court decision this summer that said the federal government had not exceeded its authority by requiring platforms to remove potential misinformation.

But Zuckerberg's letter publicly played into the hands of Republicans, who have long falsely claimed that social media platforms have colluded with liberal government officials to censor conservative voices. Zuckerberg acknowledged that there have been cases where platforms have stopped or curbed the spread of dangerous misinformation about the pandemic or blatant lies about the election, such as incorrect polling location, but that happened under both the Trump and Biden administrations.

In recent years, the platforms run by Zuckerberg and billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk have removed many of the guardrails designed to curb the spread of viral misinformation, including allowing Trump back on the platform after he was banned following the Jan. 6 attacks.

Zuckerberg, who previously donated more than $400 million to improve voting access in the U.S., also told Jordan he would no longer support the election effort after coming under attack from Republicans who argued that the funds, disparagingly referred to as “Sugarbucks,” had helped Biden win key swing states.

“I know some people believe this work has benefited one party more than the other,” he wrote. “My goal is to remain neutral and not play a role – or even appear to play a role – in either direction. As such, I do not plan to make a similar contribution this election cycle.”

As the Covid-19 pandemic depleted local resources during the 2020 election, private companies like Facebook stepped in to fill election offices' coffers with these grants. Given the explosion of mail-in voting during the pandemic, which requires more resources than in-person voting, counties across the country were happy to accept the money. But after Trump lost several key states and counties that had received the money, Republicans used it as a scapegoat.

Republicans hailed the decision to cut funding as a victory, and the Judiciary Committee also applauded the move.

The Meta boss even went a step further, telling the committee that the company's decision to temporarily restrict publication of the infamous October 2020 New York Post article on Hunter Biden's laptop was a mistake – a decision he had previously regretted.

Zuckerberg said it was “made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and that in hindsight we should not have downgraded the story.”

But while the contents of the laptop reported by the Post turned out to be authentic, according to the Justice Department, the New York Post's reporting in 2020 spread a false narrative that was simultaneously being spread by the Russian government. That false narrative claimed that Joe Biden had “pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating” the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where his son was on the board.

Zuckerberg's letter comes just weeks after he told Bloomberg that Trump's response to an assassination attempt was “crass,” even though the former president threatened to send the meta-boss to prison if he was re-elected.

“Seeing Donald Trump stand up after being shot in the face and raise his fist with the American flag in the air is one of the craziest things I have ever seen in my life,” he told Bloomberg.

Taken together, these remarks show that Zuckerberg is making a peace offering to Republicans ahead of the election and providing them with political ammunition. In the Bloomberg interview, Zuckerberg said Meta has made changes to its platforms to reduce the amount of political content reaching users, although it remains unclear what that definition is.

“I think you'll see our services play a smaller role in this election than in the past,” he said.