What Mark Zuckerberg really said — and didn’t say — in that letter to Congress

Mark Zuckerberg just gave congressional Republicans a weapon to use in the upcoming election. But it may not be a particularly strong one.

Here’s a head-scratcher: Why did Mark Zuckerberg just send Congress a letter admitting that Meta has screwed up in the past?

I have a hunch.

But before you can get into that, you have to look at what Zuckerberg actually said in his letter to Jim Jordan, the Republican lawmaker who has spent years trying to find evidence of an anti-conservative bias in Big Tech.

Very briefly:

• Zuckerberg says that in 2021, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor some posts about the COVID-19 pandemic — pressure Zuckerberg now says was wrong. He says Biden’s White House wasn’t ultimately responsible for any actions Facebook took, however, because “we own our decisions.” But he has some regrets about some of them today.
• Zuckerberg says that in 2020, Facebook “temporarily demoted” a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And that in retrospect, it shouldn’t have.
• Zuckerberg says that, unlike during the 2020 election, his Chan Zuckerberg charity won’t spend money on helping people register to vote. He says he thought it was a decent thing to do four years ago, “to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.”

In online conservative circles, starting with Jordan himself, Zuckerberg’s letter/mea culpa is supposed to be a very big deal: a “Big win for free speech,” as Jordan’s judiciary committee tweeted.

But if you take a closer look at what Zuckerberg said, and didn’t say, you may come to the conclusion I’ve reached: that Zuckerberg very carefully gave Jordan just enough to claim a political victory — but without getting Meta in any further trouble while it defends itself against a federal antitrust suit.

Let’s dig in. The first item in the letter, about the Biden White House pressuring Facebook during the pandemic, is by far the most politically meaningful.

For years, conservatives like Jordan have argued that Big Tech companies like Facebook have an anti-Republican bias. And here, finally, you have a Big Tech CEO saying a Democratic administration did indeed try to influence what happened on the platform. And that Zuckerberg now regrets some of the calls his team made about COVID content during the election.

People who pay attention to Silicon Valley and its internal fights over moderation on platforms like Facebook will know that Zuckerberg’s comments are pretty mild. It’s well established that various government bodies — including the Trump White House — were talking to all the platforms about COVID posts, among other things. And that there’s been an industrywide pendulum swing against some of the platform-moderation efforts that built up over the years.

Still, there is something to be said for having the guy running one of the biggest platforms to say that stuff to lawmakers out loud, on the record.

Will that sway an undecided voter a few months before the 2024 election? I don’t think so. But Republicans will try to make it so.

The letter becomes markedly less important after that. Zuckerberg’s pledge not to fund voter-registration efforts doesn’t seem very important since the pandemic has subsided. And while he acknowledges that those donations have been politicized by “some people” — which would include Jordan and other Republicans — he says his only regret about them is that they were politicized.

But the most telling thing about Zuckerberg’s letter is the laptop anecdote.

If you’re a normal person, the “Hunter Biden laptop story” probably doesn’t mean much to you. If you spend time with a particular strain of conservative, it means a lot: It’s a laptop containing all kinds of embarrassing emails and documents created by Joe Biden’s son, which was initially dismissed by many people as a 2020 election hoax (for context: The Wall Street Journal, which had a first crack at the story, ended up passing; when the Post ran the story, one of the authors had his byline removed from the piece).

The concern that the laptop story was some kind of hack or disinformation campaign was why Twitter (bear with me here) prevented users from sharing links to the New York Post’s coverage of the story in October 2020 — a dramatic overreach the company subsequently apologized for.

But now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook has admitted that it, too, made it harder for its users to get to that story. Aha!

Except you don’t need a congressional committee to uncover that one. Because Facebook told the world it was doing that, as it was doing that.

Here’s Facebook’s rep Andy Stone, on October 14, 2020.

While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020

What if you were busy back then — what with the pandemic, and the election and all — and missed it?

No problem. Facebook executives have talked about this multiple times. Like in 2022, when Zuckerberg went on one of the world’s most popular podcasts and told Joe Rogan why it “sucks” that he got the laptop story wrong. “When we take down something that we’re not supposed to, that’s the worst.”

As maybe-well-intentioned-but-definitely-mistaken platform decisions go, making it hard to find the New York Post’s coverage of the laptop story wasn’t great. But it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as Twitter’s call, which is why you don’t hear many people obsessing about it today.

But “not a lot of people knowing about something” is not nearly the same as “Mark Zuckerberg admitting something.” The former statement is true. The second isn’t, but is way more exciting.

Which again, seems like the point of the whole exercise: Zuckerberg has tried to give Jim Jordan and his party a win — while giving them very little at all.