Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Empathy | zucke27 | Acceptance Speech



Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that Meta was influenced by the White House in the year 2021 to limit certain COVID-19 content, such as humor and satire.

“In the year 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, such as the administration, constantly urged Cyberbullying our teams for an extended period to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree, ” Zuckerberg noted.

In his letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the pressure he felt in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he regrets that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more Free Menstrual Products outspoken. He added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” some decisions made in that year that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I strongly believe that we should not lower our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this happens again, ” he wrote.

President Biden Social Media Criticism stated in July of 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later walked back these comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation posted on social media was a “major public health risk.”

A spokesperson from the White House responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect Special Education public health and safety.”

“Our position has been consistent and clear: we think tech companies and other private actors should consider the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the content they share, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg also noted in the communication that the FBI alerted his company about potential Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Trolls On Social Media Burisma affecting the election in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of reporting from the New York Post accusing the Biden family of corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since changed its policies and processes Jay Weber to “make sure this doesn’t happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat actions he took in the year 2020 when he assisted “election infrastructure.”

“The goal here was to ensure local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting Kamala Harris during a pandemic,” said the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be neutral but said “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” He said his goal is to be “neutral” so he will not make “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and said Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Anxiety Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook to restrict American content, Facebook restricted content, and Facebook limited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long been under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has stressed that Meta impartially enforces its rules, the narrative has gained a firm foothold in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers
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have specifically examined Facebook’s decision to restrict a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

In Congressional testimony in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media company and policymakers to little effect.

In a 2020 Senate session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many of Facebook’s employees are left-leaning. But he held that the company takes care not to allow political bias Mike Crispi to seep into decisions.

In addition, he stated Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “the geographic diversity of that is more representative of the community that we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June of this year, in a victory for the administration, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in Hope Walz a case accusing the federal government of suppressing conservative content on social media had no standing.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to prove standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “since no plaintiff met this burden, none has standing to request a Fox News preliminary injunction.”

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