Unpacking Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Congress about Biden and Facebook

Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seemed to express regret to Congress about failing to speak out when the Biden administration pressured the social network to “censor” some COVID-19 posts during the pandemic.

He made the comments in an Aug. 26 letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Peter Kafka, who covers media and technology as chief correspondent for Business Insider, joined Brad Mielke on Wednesday’s episode of “Start Here,” ABC News’ flagship daily news podcast, to discuss the content of Zuckerberg’s letter, Facebook’s approach to moderation and how tech companies work with politicians.

START HERE: When you hear about misinformation, it can sound really academic. Annoying at worst.

In the last few years though, we’ve seen how impactful misinformation can be. How a series of false stories about stealing elections can turn into a riotous mob. How a war can be justified to a country’s citizens by saying, “our neighbors need to be invaded.”

And perhaps most dramatically, there was the COVID-19 pandemic which has not only killed 7 million people and counting, but has seen misinformation campaigns leading to long-lasting consequences. The U.S. surgeon general declared this abstract idea a very real risk. You might remember at the peak of the pandemic, sites like Facebook were furiously trying to keep dangerous misinformation off their sites. Well this week, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee apologizing for doing exactly that.

Let’s bring in Peter Kafka, the chief correspondent for Business Insider, where he covers media and technology. Peter, we’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg apologize before. But he apologizes for doing too little as a company, right? Rarely for doing too much. What was this letter all about?

KAFKA: Well, I’m not entirely sure what this letter is all about. We can talk about what’s in it, but the apology you make reference to is a specific thing. That’s a pretty short letter saying, look, during the pandemic in 2020, 2021, the Biden White House — he singles out the Biden White House, I think that’s important — was in touch with us about a lot of stuff they wanted us to take down around COVID-19 and a lot of that advice they gave us, we didn’t take.

But we still took stuff down that in retrospect, we wish we hadn’t. So he’s both saying “Hey, the White House should not have reached out to us in the way they did,” which seems a little bit revisionist to me. But also, “We took down some stuff that, in retrospect, I wish we would have kept up.” So that’s the mea culpa part.

In addition to the COVID stuff that Mark Zuckerberg talks about, there’s two other things that he mentions. One is another apology. He’s saying look, in October 2020, the New York Post wrote what seemed to be a very sketchy story at the time about Hunter Biden’s laptop, with this kind of unbelievable backstory about how it showed up from a Delaware computer repair shop and Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon brought it in, and it just seemed bogus. And, and so we made it hard to find that story for a while, and we shouldn’t have.

So that was a bad thing we did, as well. The issue there I bring up is that that wasn’t a secret. Facebook had mentioned they were doing that in real time in October 2020, and they have subsequently apologized for it multiple times. So there’s nothing new there.

And then last, Zuckerberg says, look on my own through my charity with my wife, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, we spent about $400 million personally through our charity, in 2020 to try to facilitate safe voting. There was a pandemic, we wanted people to know how to vote safely, how they could vote remotely, etc..

That donation has subsequently been weaponized, really by Republicans. They said this was a way for us to sort of influence the election on behalf of Democrats. We don’t think that’s true at all. But we want to be neutral. And so we’re not going to bother doing that again this time. Also, there’s no pandemic, so we don’t need to do that.

START HERE: Well, I guess I want to know why. Like why would you do this if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you spent the last several years telling everyone like, “Hey, we are stewards of our community. Like we’re trying to make the internet a safer place.”

And now in this letter, like you said to a Republican-led committee, you’re saying we’ve been overstepping quite a bit. We’ve been pressured, like we’ve gotten phone calls from the White House. Like, I’m sure lots of companies have gotten calls from the White House advocating their interest, and we shouldn’t have taken that advice, and we actually should have let everyone say whatever they want. Why now?

KAFKA: You know, there’s a lot of tech people who started off thinking, “We can ignore Washington and government in general, and we can sort of be on our own.” And 20 or 30 years ago, that was a pretty common perception in Silicon Valley.

And over the years, eventually, these big companies, which are almost entirely based in the U.S., say “Oh, we are actually beholden to U.S. law, to foreign lawmakers, especially in the EU. And we have to deal with all these governments one way or another. And so we have to spend a lot of time lobbying them and getting our points across and occasionally showing up in front of Congress, testifying,” that sort of thing.

The letter that Zuckerberg sent to Jim Jordan, Republican running the Judiciary Committee, he’s been going after this idea of bias in tech for years. He’s got a lot of critics who say he’s really harassing people, he’s not looking for truth.

But be that as it may, I interpret that as Zuckerberg saying look, here’s a way for me to say very little. A lot of it, I’ve said before. For me to sort of apologize to something that I’m kind of taking blame for, but I’m also blaming the Democrats for. And I’ll say this, the Republicans will say “Look, look at the scalp – we got Mark Zuckerberg to apologize and blame Joe Biden. This is great.”

And my thinking is, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you think if I say this to you, and my sense is he probably negotiated this with Jim Jordan and the committee, can we just sort of agree to move on and we can sort of give me a pass?

There are ongoing conversations about what these big platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. — should or should not be doing about what’s on their websites. And we could spend a lot of time talking about it. But in general, these sites all sort of start off very hands off, doing very little moderation as they get bigger, as they get more valuable, as they have more to lose, as people pay more attention to them, they moderate more and more.

And that stuff sort of came to a head up through 2020, and partly, as I think, a sort of reaction to the pandemic and debates about what is misinformation and what should we have allowed people to not or not say about COVID, partly about Elon Musk taking over Twitter and saying, I’m going to try to have as little moderation as I want.

I think the pendulum and Silicon Valley is sort of moving back away from, let’s moderate a lot to maybe let’s moderate less. But to be clear, if you run one of these big internet companies, you have to moderate stuff. You will be under tremendous legal liability if you don’t. If you don’t want to moderate anything, don’t run a big platform. And that’s going to be the issue with Telegram and France.

START HERE: Right, and that pendulum swinging that you’re describing again, how real these effects can be down the road as they filter the way down to just regular users. OK, Peter Kafka from Business Insider, really insightful. Thank you.

KAFKA: Thanks for having me.