In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that the Biden-Harris administration exerted significant pressure on Meta to censor COVID-19-related content. Zuckerberg stated that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including those from the White House, repeatedly pressured Meta's teams to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, expressing frustration when the company did not comply. Despite this pressure, Zuckerberg emphasized that it was Meta's decision whether to take content down, and the company stands by its decisions, including those related to COVID-19.

Zuckerberg admitted that he regrets not being more vocal about the pressure from the administration and believes that some of the choices made at the time, in hindsight, were not the right ones. He asserted that Meta should not have compromised its content standards due to pressure from any administration and vowed that the company would resist similar pressures in the future.

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Republicans, shared Zuckerberg’s letter on the social media platform "X". The committee’s post highlighted three key admissions from Zuckerberg: that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor content, that Facebook complied with this pressure, and that it also restricted access to the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a win for free speech.

In his letter, Zuckerberg also recounted another instance involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which allegedly warned Meta about a potential Russian disinformation campaign related to the Biden family and Burisma before the 2020 election. Following this warning, Meta temporarily demoted a New York Post story about corruption allegations involving Joe Biden’s family while it awaited fact-checker review. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the story was not Russian disinformation and admitted that the decision to demote it was a mistake.