Tom Slater: How Facebook became Biden’s personal censor

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Take Mark Zuckerberg — the CEO of Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. Despite presiding over a growing empire of censorship over the past decade, he’s very suddenly had a change of heart. He’s just issued a semi-apology, bashing the outgoing Biden administration for essentially forcing him to muzzle his users. In a letter addressed to U.S. Republican congressman Jim Jordan, who has been leading a congressional investigation into Big Tech censorship, Zuckerberg says the Joe Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor dissenting content about Covid-19, including satire and humour. “I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg writes. “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.”

Call me a cynic, but if he really feels this strongly about it you’d think he would have spoken out a little sooner, before Biden had one slipper out of the Oval Office door. Of course, it’s absolutely true that Joe Biden and the Democrats heaped pressure on Facebook and others to suppress any pesky dissent to their increasingly tyrannical Covid measures. Biden threatened them with “antitrust” proceedings and revoking their Section 230 privileges — a law which ensures tech firms are not generally liable for what their users post. In July 2021, Biden went so far as to accuse Facebook of “killing people,” while his surgeon general called for “legal and regulatory measures” to tackle online “misinformation.” This was an outrageous attempt to browbeat the private sector into doing the government’s censorship for it.

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What was less out in the open was how willing Facebook was to do the state’s bidding, even before Biden entered the White House. From the early days of the pandemic, Facebook was cracking down hard on what its know-nothing moderators deemed to be Covid misinformation, taking its lead from government health advice. It even took down event pages for anti-lockdown protests, on the grounds that they would break local social-distancing rules. What’s more, as Robby Soave has exposed in Reason, Facebook later developed an uncomfortably cosy relationship with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By May 2021, CDC officials were “routinely vetting” claims about Covid-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook, reports Soave, who got his hands on a trove of emails. The CDC wasn’t just offering its thoughts on which claims were false, but also those that might cause “harm” or risked driving up vaccine hesitancy. “Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process,” he notes. At various points in the email exchanges, Meta employees called their CDC contacts “colleagues” and “repeatedly thanked” them for their “help in debunking.”

This censorship wasn’t limited to Covid, either. Nor did it all start in 2020. From 2016 onwards, Facebook began to crack down on more and more accounts, and more and more categories of speech, in response to hysterical campaigns from the anti-Trump establishment, which was convinced that a mix of alt-right trolls, Russian disinformation and conspiracy theorists had helped get The Donald elected. This panic reached its crescendo in the run-up to the 2020 election. Facebook was one of the many platforms that gladly suppressed the Hunter Biden revelations — a New York Post exposé alleging that Joe Biden was embroiled in his son’s influence-peddling in Ukraine. The evidence from the laptop was reflexively condemned as Russian disinformation by former spooks, and shunned by other media outlets, even though it later transpired to be legit. In August 2022, Zuckerberg revealed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that FBI agents even approached Facebook execs before the election, telling them to be “on guard” for disinformation of this ilk. They essentially primed Facebook to respond in the way that it did, albeit without specifically mentioning Hunter and the laptop. Now, Zuckerberg admits that was a mistake, too. Which is one way of putting it. You could comfortably call it election interference, given Big Tech suppressed a damning story about one of the candidates during an election.

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What should we make of Zuckerberg’s mea culpa? It’s not a principled change of heart, that’s for sure. And those hoping his letter will soon translate into a rolling back of Facebook’s dizzying array of existing speech codes will probably be waiting for a very long time. Perhaps he just fears which way the wind is blowing. Following the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France and Keir Starmer’s and the EU’s sabre-rattling against Elon Musk’s X, Western governments appear to be swapping the carrot and stick for a baseball bat when it comes to encouraging social-media firms to censor. Perhaps Zuck has realized that nothing he does will ever be good enough for them. All I can say for certain is that allowing vast swathes of the digital public square to become the sole property of a handful of weird, easily influenced billionaires was a truly terrible idea.

-spiked

Tom Slater is editor of spiked.