On August 26, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook and Instagram) wrote to the US House Judiciary Committee, expressing regret for censoring posts in 2021:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams 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,” he continued.

The House Judiciary Committee sums up:

Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:

1. Biden-Harris Admin “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.

2. Facebook censored Americans.

3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024

Zuckerberg vows change: “we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Perhaps he has learned something in recent years: For instance, much of the material with respect to COVID that the U.S. government demanded that Facebook censor was either fact or evidence-based opinion, often from authoritative sources.

He even touched the third rail — the censored Hunter Biden laptop story

Australian commentator Kurt Mahlberg quotes Zuckerberg telling the Committee that it was wrong to stifle the story in 2020:

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.

Quoted in Kurt Mahlburg, “Whoops! Zuckerberg regrets censorship of Covid content and Hunter Biden laptop story,” MercatorNet, August 29, 2024

That’s a roundabout way of saying that the story passed the media smell test.

No medium can verify that any news story is true in some abstruse philosophical sense. That’s not even on the table. But this story was true in the ordinary newsgathering sense: You could run with it and stand by your reporting. Yet it was buried at the FBI’s instigation and, as Mahlburg notes, its suppression may have affected the 2020 election results:

First, looking beyond the October surprise hype, what the New York Post revealed in its 2020 reports was staggering. On that laptop was verified proof the son of then presidential hopeful Joe Biden leveraged his political access to the White House to secure lucrative overseas business deals and secretly funnel the money back to his father.

What’s more, the FBI verified Hunter Biden’s laptop as authentic as early as November 2019, according to an IRS whistleblower who testified on Capitol Hill. If so, the Bureau knowingly misled Meta when it suggested the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Mahlburg, “Whoops!”

It’s a complex story; many in media welcomed the news from security agencies that the laptop story was mere Russian disinformation. Were they truly being played or were they happy to cooperate? Not everyone welcomes the questions this story raises, which makes Zuckerberg’s admission all the more significant.

Assessing Zuckerberg’s motives

Has he had a change of heart about acting as a government’s censor — which he did for the Trump administration as well as the Biden one, by the way?

At Fox News, Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz isn’t sure. He asks, “How confident are you that Facebook would publicly push back on some hot-button issue today?”

At CNN, Jon Passantino sees Zuckerberg’s letter as “offering Republicans an olive branch ahead of the election,” “implicitly supporting right-wing ‘censorship’ narratives” That’s a curious position because at this point, it’s not a mere “narrative”; no one disputes that censorship occurred.

But most censors are paid by the governments they work for. One problem with private business acting as a censor is that it must align with government policies, however unpopular. For example, in this political advertisement, an involuntary cameo of Zuckerberg flashes by a discussion of censorship. That is not good for business.

But is Zuckerberg, after all, just trying to avoid costly litigation?

Legal scholar Philip Hamburger sees the letter as a legal ploy: “The aim, presumably, is to avoid having Meta treated as a state actor for purposes of the First Amendment and then being held liable for damages.” (Wall Street Journal) Tellingly, “Mr. Zuckerberg never says, and couldn’t say, that Meta would have made the same censorship decisions in the absence of government pressure.”

At Business Insider, media correspondent Peter Kafka sees the whole thing as “an industrywide pendulum swing against some of the platform-moderation efforts that built up over the years.”

Perhaps they are all correct. We will get a chance to see.