Elon Musk suggests Mark Zuckerberg ‘violated first amendment’ after censoring Covid content for Joe Biden

Twitter/X owner Elon Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have been feuding for a while now (the most high-profile example of their arguing being fruitless plans to partake in a “cage fight”), and the Tesla boss’s latest swipe at the Meta chief concerns Zuckerberg bowing to political pressure from the Biden administration over Covid-19.

The US Senate Committee on the Judiciary has been investigating the content moderation policies of tech giants such as Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Twitter/X and TikTok, and earlier this year Zuckerberg and X CEO Linda Yaccarino gave evidence to the committee on the issue of online child protection.

Now, in a letter to the committee’s Republican chair, Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg has expressed “regret” at not being “more outspoken” in the face of pressure from officials working for US President Joe Biden.

The correspondence, sent on Monday, reads: “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 humour 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 way of this pressure.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more spoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Actions taken by social media companies around political content on its platforms has long been of interest to Republicans, with the uneventful “Twitter Files” release of December 2022 revealing the Biden administration had made (arguably perfectly reasonable) requests to Twitter to take down pornographic images of Hunter Biden.

And in March 2021, then Twitter boss Jack Dorsey admitted to the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the company made a “total mistake” over its handling of a New York Post story pertaining to a laptop owned by Hunter – a story which has formed the basis of a right-wing conspiracy theory in Republican circles.

The central allegation – dismissed by many legitimate news organisations at the time – concerns Hunter allegedly arranging for his father to meet with an executive from Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company of which Hunter was a board member.

In addition to expressing “regrets” over its actions on coronavirus content, Zuckerberg also revealed that the FBI had warned Meta about “a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election”.

He continues: “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 US while waiting for fact checkers.”

Zuckerberg then concludes by stating his goal is “to be neutral” and not “to even appear to be playing a role” in the election cycle, ruling out making comments about “electoral infrastructure” ahead of the November vote.

Sharing the letter on Twitter/X on Monday, Republicans on the judiciary committee wrote in a sarcastic tweet: “Big win for free speech.”

While Musk waded in and said the correspondence “sounds like a first amendment violation”.

Hours later, the billionaire issued a tweet stressing his platform “really is meant to support all viewpoints within the bounds of the laws of countries”.

“Even those of people with whom I vehemently disagree and personally dislike.

“If that doesn’t seem to be happening, please yell at me (ideally on X),” he said.

It comes as Musk continues to face criticism over Twitter/X’s role in the recent UK riots, during which the tech entrepreneur branded Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir”.

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