Mark Zuckerberg Will Never Win

The Meta CEO will never satisfy his critics. He keeps trying anyway.

Aug 30, 2024, The Atlantic

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Mark Zuckerberg seems to enjoy playing politics. The only problem is that he doesn’t appear to be any good at it.

This week, the Meta CEO wrote a letter to Representative Jim Jordan in response to an inquiry about Meta’s content-moderation policies. Jordan, an Ohio Republican, and the House Judiciary Committee have been investigating supposed collusion between President Joe Biden’s administration and technology companies to censor free speech online. In his letter addressing these concerns, Zuckerberg wrote that in 2021, senior White House officials had “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor content related to COVID-19, “including humor and satire.” He also noted a separate instance from October 2020, when Meta had temporarily demoted a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after initial guidance from the FBI that there may have been a Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family in the lead-up to that year’s presidential election. In the letter, Zuckerberg notes that the article turned out not to be part of such an operation, and that “we shouldn’t have demoted the story.” Zuckerberg also made it clear that Meta had not been forced to remove any material: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down,” he wrote.

Jordan and the House Judiciary treated the letter as a revelatory confessional, despite the fact that it has been widely reported that Meta sparred with the Biden administration over COVID-19 misinformation-takedown requests. (Internal Meta correspondence was published in The Wall Street Journal and was also a key component of a recent Supreme Court case concerning the federal government intervening in social-media-moderation decisions.) Similarly, Zuckerberg and Meta previously expressed regret about the laptop story and the decision to suppress it.

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