Zuckerberg confesses, claims coercion

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Inc. (parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), confessed yesterday – in writing – to Meta’s censorship role. Now, for the first time, a CEO directly involved in the Censorship Industrial Complex has confessed to his role. Parag Agrawal, last CEO of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, boasted of his role. In contrast, Zuckerberg at least tried to show contrition for his role – and blamed someone else. It couldn’t have come at a worse time – for the Biden-Harris administration, the Democratic Party, and their various and sundry co-defendants in two comprehensive lawsuits against the censorship regime. But Zuckerberg might have another, plainer, and darker motive.

Details of the Zuckerberg Confession

Zuckerberg submitted his confession as a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. (Jordan also serves as Chairman of Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.) Chairman Jordan released the letter yesterday afternoon at 6:44 p.m. EDT. Jim Hoft at The Gateway Pundit prepared a full transcript:

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, l 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.

Note carefully what this letter covers: the Hunter Biden Laptop story, and two aspects of the coronavirus “pandemic”:

• Exaggeration of the harms from coronavirus infection, especially to those not suffering from chronic illnesses, and
• Denial or minimization of the harm from coronavirus vaccines.

It also covers the government’s role in this affair, and speaks directly to any censorship incentive Facebook might have had. Yesterday Zuckerberg denied any such incentive and explicitly blamed the Biden administration. He cannot, however, blame the Biden administration for a censorship campaign that happened before Biden took office. Who those “fact checkers” were, whom he “consulted” about the Hunter Biden Laptop, remains for someone else to discover.

The letter covers one more thing: the infamous “Zuckerbucks” that went to areas where Democrat voters lived. Or rather, where Democrat mail-in ballots were available, either on request or sent automatically. Zuckerberg is on record pledging to dole out no “Zuckerbucks” this time. Which is no great loss, because “Zuckerbucks” are now illegal in several jurisdictions.

What else it covers

Jim Hoft’s article, in addition to the above transcript, features screencaps of emails and other documents implicating the government. Hoft listed these takeaways, for which he credits Mike Benz of Foundation for Freedom Online:

The Biden White House forced tech giants to censor these five [actually, six] COVID claims – that all turned out to be accurate.

Claims that COVID was:

1. manmade,

2. manufactured,

3. bioengineered

4. a bioweapon

5. created by an individual government

6. modified through gain of function research

The Biden White House forced Big Tech to change its content moderation policies.

7. Amazon employees admitted they changed their content moderation due to pressure from the Biden regime.

8. Amazon changed its bookstore policies due to criticism from the Biden regime.

9. Facebook employees admitted Facebook censored the man-made theory due to pressure from the Biden regime.

The Biden Administration targeted truthful information and even satire that went against their beliefs.

10. The Biden regime pressured Facebook to block content that was negative about the vaccines.

And the Biden Administration pressured social media to “do more.”

Mark Zuckerberg is late confessing his complicity in the censorship regime, which Americans have known since after the 2022 Midterms. After Republicans “flipped” the House, Jim Jordan began serious investigations, and dropped at least three threads about Facebook. These included an introduction, a thread concerning the vaccine campaign, and an investigation of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In covering this last, CNAV discovered these links to a direct portal that the government provided to Facebook. Herewith the direct link, and the link through the Wayback Machine.

All this casts doubt on Zuckerberg’s sincerity – so why did he send that letter now, after refusing several Congressional subpoenas? He has two likely reasons. First, Donald Trump looks like an unstoppable winner – so the Meta CEO wants to avoid prosecution. Second, he faces damning exposure in light of the Telegram Arrest over the weekend. The French Office of the Procureur de la République has released the charges that Pavel Durov, head of Telegram, now faces. Again, Jim Hoft provided a transcript:

This judicial investigation was opened against person unnamed, on charges of:

Complicity – web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group,

Refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law,

Complicity – possessing pornographic images of minors,

Complicity – distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in organized group,

Complicity – acquiring, transporting, possessing, offering or selling narcotic substances,

Complicity – offering, selling or making available, without legitimate reason, equipment, tools, programs or data designed for or adapted to get access to and to damage the operation of an automated data processing system,

Complicity – organized fraud,

Criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment,

Laundering of the proceeds derived from organized group’s offences and crimes,

Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration,

Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration,

Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.

What this means

These charges arise solely out of activity that takes place on Telegram’s accounts, without Pavel Durov’s direct participation. Note these two charges:

Complicity – possessing pornographic images of minors,

Complicity – distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in organized group,

Those charges could apply with equal, if not greater, force to Facebook and Instagram. In fact the Attorney General of New Mexico is already suing Meta over that very issue.

But the White House might have made themselves vulnerable in the lawsuit (Missouri v. Biden) already pending against them. According to Fox Business, the White House answered Zuckerberg’s letter thus:

When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.

The White House just made a very foolish mistake. Recently the Supreme Court vacated a massive preliminary injunction against the government. They did so on the theory that the plaintiffs have not, thus far, shown coercion by the government. But now Zuckerberg cries “Coercion!” – and the White House, in making that statement, now only admitted but avowed it. To “take into account the effects their actions have on the American people,” is to become a State actor. Surely, lawyers for the “Missouri plaintiffs” will introduce that statement, with the Zuckerberg letter, into evidence. Then Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana (Monroe Division) will find the government guilty as alleged and impose a permanent injunction.

Before that happens, Trump should win reelection, and the Republicans should “flip” the Senate and keep the House. Then they can legislate against censorious agencies – or perhaps dissolve them.