Meta

1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025
United States

August 26, 2024

The Honorable Jim Jordan
Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
United States House of Representatives
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Chairman Jordan:

I appreciate the Committee's interest in content moderation on online
platforms. As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as
part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for
transcribed interviews. Further to our cooperation with your investigation,
I welcome the opportunity to share what I've taken away from this process.

* * *

There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts
with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our
platforms are for everyone -- we're about promoting speech and helping
people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear
from governments around the world and others with various concerns around
public discourse and public safety.

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 humor 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 wake of this
pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, 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.
Like I said to our teams at the time, 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.

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian
disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up
to the 2020 election. 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 U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made
during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The
idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country
had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global
pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
They were designed to be non-partisan -- spread across urban, rural, and
suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I've seen showing
otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party
over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or
another -- or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don't plan on making
a similar contribution this cycle.

Respectfully,

/s/ Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Meta Platforms, Inc.

cc: The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member