Responding to demands from the House Judiciary Committee to come clean about how the federal government pressured Meta Platforms (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites) to censor the Biden administration’s preferred narratives, Chairman/CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a letter committee chairman Jim Jordan that explained some of the White House’s actions. From the Wall Street Journal:
…Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, 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 didn’t agree.” …
Zuckerberg said that he believed the pressure from the administration “was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” He said that the company had “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” and that “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 2023, NLPC presented a shareholder proposal at Meta’s annual meeting, that called upon the company to produce a semi-annual report that would itemize attempts by the government to demand removal of content on the company’s platforms, and to explain the company’s policies in responding to such requests. The company opposed our proposal (see p. 69-71 at link) and its sycophant investment house shareholders like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and others made sure our transparency request went down in flames. For good measure, Zuckerberg owns the majority of the company’s shareholding vote power to make sure nothing embarrassing passes.
In its proxy opposition statement to our proposal, Meta wrote in part:
The Oversight Board’s purpose is to protect free expression by making principled, independent decisions about important pieces of content and by issuing policy advisory opinions on Meta’s content policies. The Oversight Board is a separate entity from Meta and exercises independent judgment on both individual cases and questions of policy…
In response to a ruling and recommendation from our independent Oversight Board, we have committed to increase transparency around government requests for content removals. In addition to the information we already provide in our Transparency Center on content restricted in particular jurisdictions based on an alleged violation of local law, we plan to provide metrics on government requests that lead to content being removed for violations of our Community Standards.
This was a lie — to shareholders, which opens the company up to potential fines and penalties from the SEC for making false statements — as Meta never offered further information about government censorship requests, demands or pressure. And so-called “metrics” are meaningless — without specifically identifying the nature of such requests and who the government requester is, who cares about the quantity of demands that were made? But Zuckerberg and his Meta minions were too cowardly to refuse, or too willing to obey, their federal government masters.
Now Rep. Jordan and the Judiciary Committee, with their subpoena power, have extracted a confession out of Zuckerberg. Meta shareholders should have demanded this and more information last year when they had the opportunity.
