Meta Social Media Pressured Censorship From Biden Admin.

In a recent statement from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the social media company was found to have been pressured by the Biden administration to censor activity in 2021.

"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," Meta CEO Zuckerberg stated.

This is very shocking news. During much of the year 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic peaked during Biden's first year in office, the government forced a U.S. company to remove content that criticized them.

This is a complete and total challenge to the First Amendment, which guarantees government protection of free speech and free press. The pressure to censor material by the Biden administration not only goes against this law, but also highlights a remarkable trend in our society in recent years. Over time, many social media platforms censored many political-related material which held significant consequences for politicians, resulting in mass disenfranchisement of free speech and the variety of opinions online. Twitter, before its acquisition by Elon Musk, was very notorious for political censorship. It even removed Donald Trump's access to his Twitter account after making many partisan claims.

And even though Meta did censor much misinformation, some were just merely opinions which were unfavorable by politicians in power.

Zuckerberg promised to stay away from political involvement and guaranteeing free speech, especially after the success of X, formerly Twitter, in removing politically motivated censorship.

"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," Zuckerberg wrote.