It turns out that Republicans' concerns about the Biden administration's efforts to censor the news and information Americans see are well-founded.
In a stunning letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor content and then pushed harder after the company initially resisted the government's coercion.
In the letter released Monday, Zuckerberg said that "senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."
Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook made changes to COVID-related content and that his team is responsible for the decision to do so. He also expressed regret for succumbing to government pressure to censor content.
"I believe the government pressure was wrong," Zuckerberg wrote, "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."
He said the company would react differently if it received similar pressure again: "I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction − and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again."
It's sad but not shocking that Joe Biden's White House pressured a major social media company to block Americans' access to information deemed by government censors as inappropriate. Stories about government interference with Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, have been swirling for some time.
But the fact that Zuckerberg has acknowledged years after the fact that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured the company to censor content, even jokes, during the pandemic is quite damning.
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The First Amendment protects the right to free speech for all Americans. The Biden administration trampled on that right by using the power of government to pressure a news and information platform to block or alter what Americans were permitted to see and read.
Zuckerberg's revelation also exposes an odd double standard about the relationship the White House has with tech companies. The Biden administration has sued Apple over its supposed monopoly on cellphones, filed a lawsuit against Amazon and launched antitrust investigations into Google, Meta and Microsoft. It seems hypocritical for Biden to sue Big Tech for alleged violations and then pressure Facebook to do his bidding.
When something like Zuckerberg's letter becomes public, and an idea that Democrats have long claimed is petty and false turns out to be true, I wonder if the same thing could be happening about other important issues.
How many supposedly "baseless" Republican ideas are actually rooted in truth?
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In fact, Zuckerberg pointed to one such issue in his letter Monday.
He said the FBI warned Meta about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” before the 2020 election involving the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company with ties to Hunter Biden, the president's son. After the warning, Facebook demoted, or suppressed, a New York Post news article about Hunter Biden's business entanglements.
“We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Zuckerberg 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 said that Meta no longer demotes posts in the United States while waiting for fact-checkers to complete their work.
Now that Vice President Kamala Harris has replaced Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket, the White House's record of censorship is her record. Will she pressure social media companies in the future to remove content that makes her look bad? Will Big Tech stand up against new censorship efforts, as Zuckerberg now promises to do?
Americans have a right to know.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.