NLPC Told Zuckerberg to Release ‘Facebook Files;’ Jim Jordan is Now Doing it For Him

Late last year, when new Twitter owner Elon Musk allowed independent journalists to scour internal communications of the company officials he fired in order to report to the public about their censorship regime in collusion with the federal government, writers like Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi produced dozens of eye-opening revelations in what is now known as the “Twitter Files.”

In December, National Legal and Policy Center called upon Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take similar action and open up the “Facebook Files,” since it was well known that the government also pressured more-than-willing company leaders to censor users who refused to follow the Biden administration narratives about COVID, election integrity, Hunter Biden’s laptop, climate change, and countless other issues. NLPC’s director of corporate integrity, Paul Chesser, said in a press release at the time:

Mark Zuckerberg admitted, matter-of-factly, to Joe Rogan earlier this year that the FBI led Facebook’s moderators to believe the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. There are countless other examples of requests by government for Facebook to censor users – indeed, the company even created an online censorship portal with the word ‘takedowns’ in it, for the government to submit such requests.

 

Meta shares today are worth one-third of what they were valued on January 1^st of this year. Mr. Zuckerberg has used the company as his personal playground to pursue his metaverse fantasies, while letting Facebook wither by reputational ruin. He blames Apple’s privacy protection measures for Facebook’s revenue woes, but the truth is the social media platform is dying from self-inflicted wounds like censorship, which is driving users away.

Unfortunately Zuckerberg did not follow Musk’s lead, nor did our shareholder proposal at Meta that sought transparency about the company’s cooperation (or resistance, if there was any) with the government’s censorship demands produce any action.

But thankfully Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House subcommittee (under the Judiciary Committee) on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, has subpoena power and used the threat to pry loose Facebook’s internal documents related to government censorship. Now we are learning how much the administration pressured the company about censoring posts on matters like Hunter’s laptop, COVID, COVID shots, suppressing conservative media outlets, and how Meta sought help from the Biden administration over European Union privacy regulations in exchange for bowing to the White House’s censorship demands.

It would have been far less painful if Zuckerberg just complied with our shareholder request in the first place.