RFK is “desperate for attention”: Howard Kurtz
'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz explains why Vice President Kamala Harris should give an interview to Fox News and reacts to former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s endorsement of former President Trump on 'The Story.'
Mark Zuckerberg had to swallow several huge portions of crow.
And some minor political altercation was not on the menu.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Facebook and Meta expressed regret over important issues such as government-induced censorship and freedom of expression.
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It's good that Zuck is accepting some degree of responsibility, but it's too late now. It's been about three years.
The admission came in a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and is a major victory for Republicans. The former Harvard prodigy often defends himself with vague promises of future reforms.
After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White House officials had “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 disagreed.”
A face-to-face interview between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US President Joe Biden. (Getty Images)
That’s an important distinction. Biden’s pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could say no — and sometimes it did — but most of the time, the social media giant simply caved.
And Facebook had a publicly proclaimed agenda: to encourage millions of people to get vaccinated against Covid.
Zuckerberg said the administration's pressure “was misguided, and I regret that we haven't been more forthright about it.” His company “made some decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we would not make today… I firmly believe that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any administration in any direction, and we stand ready to fight back if something like this happens again.”
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I don't know: How sure are you that Facebook would respond publicly on a controversial issue today?
A Biden White House spokesman, in legal language that did not fully respond to Zuck's allegations, said he had “encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety… Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe technology companies and other private actors must consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the information they present.”
Two years ago, a Free Press reporter examining the “Twitter Archives” found that both the Trump and Biden administrations “directly pressured Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content about the pandemic according to their wishes.”
One document mentions the White House chief technology officer, who “led the Trump administration's calls for help from tech companies to combat misinformation.”
In this photo illustration, a Facebook logo is seen on a computer screen and a hand holding a medical syringe is seen in front of it. (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The article also said that Facebook, Google and Microsoft participated in “weekly” calls with Trump officials to discuss “general trends” at the companies. Sounds like an understatement.
But Trump was also a victim. Just four hours after a 2020 campaign video was posted that garnered half a million views, Facebook removed it, arguing that it violated the social network’s policy against COVID-19 misinformation.
Trump's team had released a clip from an interview with Fox in which the president said children were “virtually immune” to the coronavirus. Most medical experts disagreed at the time.
“They have much stronger immune systems than we do,” Trump said. “They don't have any problems. They just don't have any problems.”
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A White House spokeswoman called the move at the time “another example of Silicon Valley's blatant bias against this president, where the rules only apply in one direction.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, also made headlines for Hunter Biden's laptop.
He told Jordan that Meta “should not have demeaned” a New York Post story about the laptop shortly before the 2020 election.
Let me pause here. Downgrade is a tech-slang expression that refers to suppressing a news story, blatantly burying it so that few, if any, users ever see it. This happened after Twitter, you may recall, blocked the Post story entirely.
Former President Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana, on Friday, Aug. 9. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Trump allies gained access to the Delaware computer store owner’s laptop at a time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter dismissing the laptop story as false, and in a debate with Trump, Biden said the release of the emails had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Zuckerberg writes: “It has since become clear that the report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have downplayed the story.”
Exactly. And it took the New York Times and the Washington Post another year and a half to “authenticate” the contents of the laptop.
In the 2020 election, Zuck funded nonprofits to set up voting booths and equipment to sort mail-in ballots in the time of COVID-19, something Republicans, who they dubbed “Zuckerbucks,” argued with some justification that this unfairly benefited Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he won’t repeat the effort this time.
Last month, Trump said in a post: “All I can say is if I am elected President we will go after election fraudsters at levels never seen before and send them to prison for long periods of time. We already know who you are. DON'T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!”
In his interview with me at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made his distaste for Facebook abundantly clear, in fact using it to justify his opposition to banning TikTok, saying that it would only help Zuckerberg’s company.
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Now, some may dismiss all of this as old news, given that the events date back to the pandemic and the last election, but it raises fundamental questions that continue to resonate today, when Elon Musk's support for Trump has led many liberals to abandon X and join Threads, the Zuckerberg copycat site.
Politicians and interest groups routinely lobby the federal government, but when they use their considerable influence to pressure tech giants — secretly, behind closed doors, unbeknownst to the public — it is deeply troubling.
