An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
An emotional moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has sparked a flood of admiration and support, but it has also provoked ugly incidents of bullying on the internet.
Blog Article
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on recently that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, such as humor and satire.
“In 2021, senior members from the Biden White House, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and showed significant frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg described that the influence he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more vocal. He further stated that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”
“As I mentioned to our teams at the time, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any government from either side – and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” Zuckerberg wrote.
President Biden stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “major public health risk.”
A spokesperson from the White House replied to Zuckerberg’s communication, stating the administration at the time was promoting “responsible measures to safeguard public health.”
“Our stance has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.
Zuckerberg also mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the election in 2020.
That fall, he said, his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could assess the report.
Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced its visibility.”
Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “ensure this does not recur” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.
In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg stated he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”
“The idea here was to ensure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” stated the Meta CEO.
Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg stated his goal is to be “impartial” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”
The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have claimed Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has gained a firm foothold in conservative communities. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the divide between his social media giant and regulators to little effect.
In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he held that the company ensures political bias does not influence its decisions.
In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”
In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case alleging the federal government of censoring conservative voices on social media had no standing.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is directly linked to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37 |
38 |
39 |
40 |
41 |
42 |
43 |
44 |
45 |
46 |
47 |
48 |
49 |
50 |
51 |
52 |
53 |
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 |
58 |
59 |
60 |
61 |
62 |
63 |
64 |
65 |
66 |
67 |