Zuckerberg says White House pressured Meta over COVID-19 — and he has regrets

Mark Zuckerberg said he would not donate to organizations supporting election infrastructure this year.

It appears that there’s still some tension between Mark Zuckerberg and government officials despite the Meta CEO’s desire to remain neutral.

In a letter sent Monday to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO recalled a moment when he felt pressured by the White House.

Zuckerberg said the Biden administration repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to remove content related to COVID-19 and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company did not agree.

“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was obtained by B-17 and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

He added: “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

Internal Meta emails obtained by the Journal last year showed the company had removed content related to COVID-19 after pressure from the White House.

Still, Zuckerberg maintained in the letter to Jordan that he wanted Meta to abstain from endorsing a presidential candidate.

“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg said that, unlike in the last presidential election, he did not plan to donate to support election infrastructure in 2024. In 2020, he and his wife donated $400 million to nonpartisan organizations helping run elections during the pandemic. Republicans branded them “Zuckerbucks” and claimed that they benefited Democrats in the election.

“They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities,” he wrote in the letter. “Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.”

Though the donations have long been controversial, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May found private donations, like Zuckerberg’s, did not advantage Democrats.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In the letter, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta’s content moderation, an issue Jordan and other Republicans have been highly critical of, with them accusing the social-media company of censoring conservative viewpoints.

In 2023, Jordan threatened to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress for not providing documents related to an investigation into allegations that Meta censored conservative viewpoints.

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that in 2020, Meta suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while waiting for a fact-check, saying: “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

He said the company changed its processes to prevent this from happening again, such as no longer demoting stories while waiting for a fact-check.