We can’t let Mark Zuckerberg pass the buck on Meta’s censorship

No, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and pretend he’s a free speech champion as if there were nothing he could have done to stop the censorship at Facebook that rigged the 2020 election and probably cost lives during the pandemic.

The wanksta-lite makeover can’t hide Zuck’s sins, from throttling The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election to deplatforming a sitting president, Donald Trump, to suppressing COVID-19 dissent.

No matter how many “Iron Neck” workouts he does in an attempt to de-nerd himself, the billionaire tech titan will always be a spineless coward whose monopoly needs to be broken up. No one person should be wielding historically unprecedented power to censor political thought and speech, least of all a socially inept tech bro.

The Facebook founder whose Meta group behemoth owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp whined to Rogan Friday that “these people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” to force them to take down posts. Now he tells us.

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Biden Slams Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Shameful’ Decision to Roll Back Meta’s Censorship Regime – ‘Contrary to Everything America is About’

Joe Biden is clearly unhappy with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to repair his relationship with Donald Trump.

The outgoing president said at a press conference on Friday that Zuckerberg’s decision to roll back his platforms’ censorship policies was “really shameful” and against American values.

“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about,” he said.

“We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.”

“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff,” he continued.

“Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Orders Removal of Tampons From Men’s Bathrooms at Meta Offices and Social Media Users Have Humorous Thoughts

Meta and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s red pilling continues unabated, and social media is taking particular note of one significant change he has made.

As TGP readers know, Mark Zuckerberg has done a complete 180 on multiple issues since President Trump destroyed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. These include getting rid of far-left ‘fact checkers,’ bringing more conservatives into his company, and giving to Trump’s inaugural fund.

But his latest move may be the most decisive of all. The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg made additional changes on Tuesday, including removing the transgender and nonbinary “themes” on its Messenger chat app and getting rid of tampons in the men’s bathrooms at Meta offices.

You read that right. Meta had TAMPONS in the men’s washrooms before Zuckerberg was finally hit by reality.

From the New York Times:

That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.

Users on X responded to the news with several humorous memes, many targeting Minnesota Governor and failed VP candidate Tim Walz.

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Here’s Everything You Still Can’t Say on “Free Speech” Meta Platforms

Meta’s recent announcement of plans to “restore free expression” on its platforms is accompanied by an extensive list of content restrictions, raising questions about the breadth of speech allowed under the new rules. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed the company is “getting back to its roots” with a focus on open discourse, the detailed policies suggest significant limitations remain.

The updated guidelines categorize prohibited content into two tiers. Tier 1 bans dehumanizing speech, such as comparisons to “animals” or “pathogens,” and stereotypes such as claiming that certain groups control financial, political, or media institutions. Allegations of serious immorality or criminality, such as calling someone a terrorist or pedophile, are also prohibited.

The policy also forbids mocking alleged hate crime victims, using targeted slurs, or expressing harmful wishes, such as hoping someone contracts a disease or experiences a disaster. Even expressions as simple as saying someone “makes me vomit” fall under the banned list when targeting individuals based on protected characteristics.

Tier 2 extends restrictions to statements that support exclusion or segregation, such as denying someone access to spaces, jobs, or social services. Insults based on character, mental capacity, or physical worth are similarly prohibited, though some exceptions are made for gender-based insults in specific contexts, like romantic break-ups.

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Zuckerberg And Bezos To Donate $1 Million Each To Trump’s Inauguration Fund

Tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Meta and Amazon are both reportedly giving a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg’s donation comes following a private dinner he had with Trump at his Florida home

The Wall Street Journal reports that the donation is part of an effort by Zuckerberg to ease tensions between him and Trump.

Trump previously threatened to prosecute and jail Zuckerberg and anyone else who interfered in the election by using their tech platforms to censor information in the same vein as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020. 

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Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes for Biden Administration Censorship, Sending Liberal Elites Into Denial

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter last week to the House Judiciary Committee saying he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” from the Biden administration to “censor” COVID-19 content, causing liberal pundits and media outlets who have denied this censorship to panic and deny what Zuckerberg wrote. The Meta CEO also admitted that his company demoted a story critical of Biden’s son—the Hunter Biden laptop scandal—right before the 2020 election.

In 2021, senior officials in 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 …. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it …. and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

Journalist Kara Swisher began lying about the matter in a CNN interview, alleging that the Supreme Court had found there had been no censorship and that the Biden administration had not pressured Meta. Both claims are false.

In the recent Supreme Court ruling, judges skipped over claims of whether the Biden administration had actually censored Americans, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the White House. Swisher could have learned this by reading an article on the decision in the New York Times, the very publication where she was a contributor.

As for the Biden administration pressure to censor—something that Swisher denies—the evidence of this was made clear from Meta internal communications released by the House Judiciary Committee last May.

Zuckerberg texted three Meta officials—Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Joel Kaplan—on July 16, 2021, “Can we include that the [White House] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”

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Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now To Confess?

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. 

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. 

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now. 

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….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.

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. 

After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels. 

The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. 

The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle. 

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Zuckerberg says Biden officials ‘pressured’ Meta to ‘censor’ content: What to know

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” from the Biden administration to “censor” content on its platforms.

“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,” he wrote in the letter.

Here’s what to know about the claims.

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Biden-Harris Administration Defends Big Tech Censorship Pressure Following Zuckerberg’s Admission

The Biden-Harris White House looks determined to justify and normalize the practice of the government colluding with private companies, in this instance Big Tech, to censor speech.

After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, admitting that his company came under pressure from the current administration to conduct censorship and that he “believes” that was wrong – the White House doubled down on the controversial, and quite possibly, unconstitutional, policy.

In his letter, Zuckerberg chose to focus on Meta censoring content related to COVID-19, and in response, a White House spokesman revealed the government does not share Zuckerberg’s stance that the policy of pressure was wrong.

“Encouragement” is how that’s phrased. “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” stated the White House spokesman to media requests.

He further justified the actions described by Zuckerberg as needed because the White House believes private companies, including those from the tech industry, “should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people.”

And with the stage set in this way – the spokesman concluded that these companies are then free to make “independent choices about the information they present.”

But Zuckerberg’s letter to the Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan does a pretty good job of explaining how these “independent choices” get made. Senior figures from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg stated, in 2021 “repeatedly pressured our (Facebook, Instagram) teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”

The decision on content removal, and introduction of new rules into platform policies to facilitate censorship, Zuckerberg concedes, was “ultimately ours” –  but made under pressure.

If Meta tried to defy these “suggestions” – the administration showed “a lot of frustration.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Biden Administration Pressured Facebook on Censorship, Admits to Throttling Hunter Biden Story

In a revealing letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed significant controversies surrounding the platform’s content censorship practices, especially concerning actions taken during the 2020 presidential election cycle and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Zuckerberg confirmed that senior officials from the Biden Administration exerted “pressure” on Facebook to censor specific content related to COVID-19, criticizing the administration’s approach. Despite the external pressures, Zuckerberg emphasized that the final decisions on content moderation lay with Facebook, admitting regret over some of the decisions made under this pressure.

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