I’ve had a Facebook account for at least 15 years now.
That’s a downright horrifying fact about me that I wish I could unlearn, so obviously, I had to share it with all of you.
During that time, I’ve run the gamut from thinking that Facebook was a great product that allowed me to connect with people I hadn’t seen in ages to being pretty sure that Facebook was what 4Chan wished it was.
That was made even more apparent when we found out how social media companies like Facebook and Twitter worked with the Biden administration to censor people’s speech.
This isn’t new information.
However, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is now expressing regret and claims it’ll never happen again.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content and acknowledged it was wrong to stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.
The content the Biden administration requested that Meta take down included “humor and satire,” according to the Facebook founder, and he said he regrets complying with certain demands.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg, 40, vowed that things will be different in future should the government make similar requests.
“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,” he wrote.
If only I could believe him.
See, it’s easy for Zuckerberg to say, “Yeah, we goofed. It won’t happen again,” but they’re doing the exact same thing still.
Earlier this week, for example, a friend shared a picture of a mail truck in a cemetery. A bit had been added joking that they were delivering ballots already. Clearly, it was humor.
Facebook added a freaking fact-check to it. This one, as it happens.
Now, a fact-check’s inclusion isn’t the end of the world, but I routinely see leftist misinformation going unchecked. There’s a heavy bias at work at Facebook headquarters and it’s universally leftist.
So now, Zuckerberg regrets suppressing stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story and says he doesn’t think he’d do it again, but that’s likely because a Republican is calling him to the carpet for it.
He’d fold again and we all know it.
Why? Because to him, it wasn’t really folding.
Once upon a time, you could get away with just about anything on Facebook. If someone called you an offensive name, you were to just block them, and then move on with your life. It was a better time on the platform.
Then someone started pushing for more rules, and more restrictions, and the site got more and more trigger-happy about restricting people’s speech. What’s more, they routinely penalize users for posts they made years previously, but I’ve found that it takes far more for a leftist to get hit than for anyone on the right.
Of course, since so many times, no one is actually told what they did wrong…
Zuckerberg built Facebook, as a company, up to what it is, which is commendable, even if I don’t agree with him on so much. However, his actions regarding bias and speech policing are ultimately going to hurt that company.
But I’ve seen nothing that suggests he remotely disagrees with the idea that some speech should be restrained, which means no matter what he says, this can and likely will happen again.
Actions have consequences and this one likely impacted an election. A mea culpa and a pinky-swear not to do it again isn’t enough to convince me. Especially when almost nothing else has changed in any way to suggest otherwise.
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I'm cynical.
I'm wondering if this is part of a move by the Left against the Biden/Harris administration.
IE Many on the Left see Harris being defeated by Trump and are throwing Biden/Harris under the bus in order to "lessen" backlash toward them.
A sort of "It wasn't us who planned those bad things. It was the Evil Biden administration that ordered us to do so".
" it takes far less for a leftist to get hit than for anyone on the right."
I think this should be reversed.