Big Tech firms were asked to censor COVID-19 information that ended up being true, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has assessed.
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions,” Zuckerberg, whose company is the parent of Facebook and Instagram, said during a discussion with podcaster Lex Fridman that was released on June 8.
“And unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true,” he added. “That stuff is really tough, right? Really undermines trust.”
U.S. officials pressured Facebook and Instagram to censor posts, emails disclosed in court cases and through Freedom of Information Act requests have shown.
Rob Flaherty, a White House official, pressured Facebook to take action against “mis- and -disinformation” as well as “hesitancy-inducing content,” one email showed.
One Facebook official said in one of the messages that the company’s goal was “to help organizations to get their safety message out to the public, remove misinformation, and support overall community efforts in areas where we can be of help.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), meanwhile, showed executives with Facebook and other social media companies specific posts that were described as misinformation.
“There were a lot of things circulating that were not accurate information about COVID,” Carol Crawford, a CDC official, said during a deposition. “I didn’t believe we were asking them to remove content specifically,” she added later.
Facebook’s actions included shutting down groups aimed at supporting people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines over alleged misinformation, according to a lawsuit filed this month by people with suspected or confirmed vaccine injuries. Facebook told Flaherty in early 2021 that the company was removing groups that contained “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s new remarks, including a request for examples of censored information that turned out to be true.
