XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns, misc.news.internet.discuss   
   From: laugh@dwarfs.lol   
      
   Meta   
      
   1 Hacker Way   
   Menlo Park, CA 94025   
   United States   
      
   August 26, 2024   
      
   The Honorable Jim Jordan   
   Chairman   
   Committee on the Judiciary   
   United States House of Representatives   
   2138 Rayburn House Office Building   
   Washington, D.C. 20515   
      
   Chairman Jordan:   
      
   I appreciate the Committee's interest in content moderation on online   
   platforms. As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as   
   part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for   
   transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation,   
   I welcome the opportunity to share what I've taken away from this process.   
      
   * * *   
      
   There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts   
   with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our   
   platforms are for everyone -- we're about promoting speech and helping   
   people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear   
   from governments around the world and others with various concerns around   
   public discourse and public safety.   
      
   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. 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 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. We've changed our policies and processes   
   to make sure this doesn't happen again -- for instance, we no longer   
   temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.   
      
   Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made   
   during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The   
   idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country   
   had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global   
   pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.   
   They were designed to be non-partisan -- spread across urban, rural, and   
   suburban communities. Still, 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.   
      
   Respectfully,   
      
   /s/ Mark Zuckerberg   
      
   Mark Zuckerberg   
   Founder, Chairman & CEO   
   Meta Platforms, Inc.   
      
   cc: The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)