Former 2024 independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed the Biden-Harris administration for “pressuring” social media to “censor” him.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in a letter to Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Monday that top Biden-Harris officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook teams in 2021 to remove COVID-19 content from its platform that would not have been removed otherwise. Zuckerberg wrote that when Facebook first showed doubt, the administration “expressed a lot of frustration” with his teams.
“President Biden’s White House opened up a portal for the FBI to begin to have access to social media posts on all the different social media sites, and they the FBI, then invited in the CIA. DHS, the IRS, and PSI,” Kennedy explained.
“PSI say is this new agency that is the center of the censorship industrial complex that is in charge of making sure Americans don’t hear things that their government doesn’t want them to hear? And those agencies and other agencies, including the health agencies like CDC, were given access to go into the social media sites and change posts and slow walk things and, and shadow ban pose that it was part of that effort,” Kennedy continued.
“And they removed my Instagram account. I had almost a million followers,” Kennedy told Carlson.
“They say it was for misinformation, but they could not point to a single post that I ever made that was factually erroneous. And they actually, Facebook pushed back, and the email chain. You can see Facebook pushing back at the White House and saying, ‘Wait a minute. He’s not — this isn’t misinformation. This is not actually erroneous. What they’re saying is actually true,’” Kennedy added.
Kennedy said: “They had to invent a new word which is called malinformation, which is information that is factually true but nevertheless inconvenient for the government. And that became disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. That’s what that is. So that everybody and—”
“Isn’t that — that’s illegal!” Carlson declared.
Zuckerberg told Jordan that he is now sure that the platform shouldn’t lower its standards “because of pressure from any administration in either direction.”
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook is “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Zuckerberg admitted in the letter that the platform should not have censored the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He noted that the FBI had “warned the platform about a potential Russian disinformation operation concerning the Biden family and Burisma leading 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,” he wrote. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Zuckerberg wrote that the platform “no longer temporarily demotes things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
RFK Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
