What in the world is going on here?

After doing this for 10+ years and counting, I can see around a lot of corners and I typically can get a good read on exactly what’s happening with any given story fairly quickly.

But this is a stunner to me.

Mark Zuckerberg just sent a letter to Congress revealing what we all long-suspected: that the Biden Administration pressured him to censor content, both political and health (COVID) content:

Here’s a zoom-in on the letter:

Transcript here if this is easier to read:

Meta
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025
United States

August 26, 2024

The Honorable Jim Jordan
Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
United States House of Representatives
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Chairman Jordan:

I appreciate the Committee’s interest in content moderation on online platforms. As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation, I welcome the opportunity to share what I’ve taken away from this process.

There’s a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our platforms are for everyone — we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t 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. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. 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.

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

Respectfully,

/s/ Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Meta Platforms, Inc.

cc: The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member

The stunning part is that the letter seems to “come out of the blue” — not in response to anything but seemingly just sent in on a whim.

What is going on here?

In baseball, I believe we would call this an “unforced error”.

Patrick Bet-David was similarly perplexed and suggested three possible explanations:

To which I added a 4th Option:

Sorry but I don’t think you just get to do all of this and then fire off a letter claiming it was a big mistake and begging for forgiveness.

That’s not how this works.

I want to know what impact, if any, these actions had on the election.

Did they influence the election?

Did they sway the results?

How many people would have voted differently if Facebook didn’t determine what you could and couldn’t see?

I lived this first-hand.

Heading into the 2020 election, our Trump Facebook Page had 1.5 MILLION Followers and it was very active.

Hundreds of thousands of views and clicks every week.

We were literally reaching MILLIONS of people.

Then one day in late summer the Page was DELETED.  POOF.  Gone.

No warnings.

They didn’t even make an attempt to claim we violated a rule (because we didn’t).

They just deleted us.

Wiped out.

Is THAT election interference?

How many people didn’t hear our message leading up to that election because we were silenced with no judge, no jury and no right to appeal?

Just deleted with one click of Mark Zuckerberg’s keyboard.

How many people did that affect?

Well, at least 1.5 million!

And counting all the thousands of shares we would get on a daily basis, I think the true number is 2x, 5, 10x or even more.  Likely tens of millions of people never saw the TRUTH we print around here because Mark Zuckerberg thought we didn’t deserve to exist on Facebook.

Is this Election Interference?

Is this a Violation of our First Amendment rights?

No, this is not just some “private company” that can do whatever they want.  Enough with that BS.

Mark Zuckerberg’s own letter has now taken that option away from the discourse.

This was the Federal Government putting their thumb on Facebook to censor people like ME!

And if you ask me, that’s a textbook violation of the First Amendment and possibly Election Interference and possible even Treason.

What do you think?

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.

View the original article here.

 

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