By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-01-07 17:51:40 | Updated at 2025-01-08 16:13:03
22 hours ago
Powerful House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan praised Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday for ending censorship efforts at his company — and urged other Big Tech firms such as Google to follow suit.
Zuckerberg announced earlier Tuesday that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was closing its censor-susceptible fact-checking shop in the US and replacing it with a user-fueled “Community Notes” system like that used by X.
Jordan told The Post that Zuckerberg should be hailed for taking the lead “in upholding freedom of speech online.
“Today’s news from Mark Zuckerberg comes after our committee conducted rigorous oversight to protect the First Amendment,” Jordan (R-Ohio) said, referring to a series of investigations by the Judiciary panel, including over Facebook’s collusion with the FBI to pre-bunk reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
“Last August, Zuckerberg admitted to our committee that the Biden White House had pressured Facebook to censor Americans,” Jordan said. “Today is a huge step in the right direction.
“We are pleased to see Meta’s stated commitment to free speech. Social media, AI and other technology companies must resist governments’ censorship pressure and instead work to ensure the open expression of ideas on their platforms.
“We hope that other Big Tech companies, including Google, follow the lead of X and Meta in upholding freedom of speech online,” the Judiciary chair added.
Self-described “free speech absolutist” and billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, in 2022 after reports of the social-media firm’s acquiescence to intelligence agencies and the White House keen on suppressing content at odds with their COVID stances or potentially damaging to the first family.
X’s “Community Notes” comment forum was soon born, and Zuckerberg is now taking a page from his fellow social-media mogul.
“Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives,” the Meta boss said of his platform’s programs dedicated to rooting out so-called “misinformation.”
“This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact-check and how,” Zuckerberg explained in a video message announcing his company’s policy shift. “A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”
Jordan’s committee revealed over the course of a two-year probe how Facebook had worked with “senior Biden administration officials,” including at the White House, to “censor” certain posts on the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of vaccines against it and other pandemic-related content.
Judiciary investigators also released documents showing how a member of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in the San Francisco field office leaned on Facebook and Twitter to suppress The Post’s bombshell scoop about first son Hunter Biden’s foreign-business ventures involving his father.
That bureau agent, Elvis Chan, flouted a subpoena last year when asked to answer questions before the committee and was later sued.
Jordan’s panel went on to obtain testimony from the task force’s section chief, Laura Dehmlow, who confirmed that the FBI had informed Twitter content moderators Oct. 14, 2020, that the report on Hunter’s laptop was legitimate — despite indicating wrongly beforehand that it was potentially part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation.
Chan in a private phone call with a Facebook employee at the same time had also confirmed “there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection or direction of the leak,” according to an Oct. 15, 2020, message later obtained by the Judiciary Committee.
That communication is directly at odds with a Nov. 29, 2022, deposition he gave as part of the Missouri v. Biden federal case, which the Supreme Court later rejected for lack of standing, on the Biden administration’s suppression of free speech online, during which Chan claimed he had “no internal knowledge” of The Post’s suppression.
“Even though the FBI had been in possession of this laptop for nearly a year and had verified the provenance of its contents, the FBI made the institutional decision to refuse to answer direct questions from social media companies about the laptop’s authenticity — despite months of constant information sharing up to that time,” Jordan has said of the series of deeply disturbing events.
The FBI, which held more than 30 meetings with Twitter, Facebook and other social media giants in the lead-up to the 2020 election, also shared the false information after having confirmed Hunter’s laptop’s authenticity as far back as November 2019, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who testified before the Judiciary Committee.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in an Aug. 27, 2024, mea culpa letter to Jordan.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he admitted.
In a recent Judiciary subcommittee report, staff members also warned about a growing threat from the US government to martial draconian artificial intelligence tools in an effort to monitor civilian protests and stifle dissent.
Since President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November, Zuckerberg has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and visited him at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
