National Review Online
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
In a letter to Representative Jim Jordan, Mark
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has apologized for his company’s decision to play along with
the many requests for censorship that were made by the Biden administration
during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. “I believe the government pressure was
wrong,” Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee, “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.”
In June, in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, the
Supreme Court declined to weigh in on whether the Biden administration’s
conduct had been unconstitutional. Irrespective, its behavior represents one of
the worst political scandals of recent years. Per Zuckerberg, the Biden White
House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook and Instagram to remove “certain COVID-19
content including humor and satire” and “expressed a lot of frustration” in the
rare cases that it demurred. That, clearly, is not how the federal government
should be behaving toward the free speech of its citizens. That those demands
were made — and that resistance to them was treated as it was — is a sign that
something went very wrong.
In a statement, the White House pointed to the existence
of a “deadly pandemic” and cast its actions as having protected “public health
and safety.” “We believe,” the administration submitted, that “tech companies
and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions
have on the American people, while making independent choices about the
information they present.” But, as Mark Zuckerberg confirmed, the Biden team’s
habit went far beyond a desire to save lives. Confirming that Facebook had
throttled accurate reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop,
Zuckerberg apologized for that, too. “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted
the story,” he wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure
this doesn’t happen again.” What, one wonders, would the Biden campaign claim
was its unselfish justification for that?
Whether Zuckerberg’s words are worth anything remains to
be seen. In his letter, he says that he feels “strongly that we should not
compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in
either direction” and insists that Meta is “ready to push back if something
like this happens again.” But that is always easier to say outside of a crisis
than within one. Now, it is helpful for Zuckerberg to side with free
expression. Three years ago, it was not. Then, he and his employees were being
accused of murder, genocide, human sacrifice, and granny-killing, and the
Hunter Biden story was being cynically transmuted into dangerous “Russian
disinformation.” If, indeed, “something like this happens again,” all of those
tactics will immediately return. Is Zuckerberg ready and willing to ignore
them?
That the Supreme Court has not laid down a set of rules
that would prevent a repeat performance is regrettable. But it should not be
the end of the story. Facebook is a private company. Its site is not public
property but a private space, and beyond its obligation to remain in compliance
with the law, Facebook is (and it should continue to be) free to take down
posts for any reason it likes. We may not always like the results, but a
respect for private property is, like an aversion to state censorship, a fundamental
American principle. Technically, the decision to take down a post remained
Facebook’s despite the pressure from the administration. Nevertheless,
“requests” from the White House can be extraordinarily persuasive. Should it so
wish, Congress could pass a law that established some boundaries that limit the
extent to which the executive should be allowed to exert pressure on a
social-media company to delete posts with which it is unhappy — or, at the very
least, that mandated real-time transparency from all in the government who are
involved. It would be nice to think that Mark Zuckerberg has truly found
religion on the matter of free speech, but, on the off chance that he has not,
our legislators ought to do the spadework for him and ensure that, next time an
American president tries to bully a social-media company into regulating jokes,
we don’t have to wait three long years to find out about it.
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