The heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.

The heartfelt exchange between Tim Walz and his teenage son, Gus, has sparked a wave of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.

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Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was pressured by the White House in the year 2021 to restrict certain COVID-19 content, including satirical and humorous posts.

“In the year 2021, senior officials from the Biden White House, including the White House, constantly urged our teams for months to remove some content about COVID-19, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he experienced in 2021 was “inappropriate” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media networks are “causing harm” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”

“Our stance has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the public, while making their own decisions about the content they share, ” according to the White House representative.

Zuckerberg also mentioned in the communication that the FBI warned his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily demoted a New York Post report accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” and will no longer demote content in the US while waiting for fact-checkers.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his aim is to be “impartial” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP representatives on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have claimed Facebook and other major tech platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to limit the circulation of a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are liberal. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a case alleging the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
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