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Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in a communication to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his company was influenced by the Biden administration in 2021 to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

“In 2021, senior members from the Biden Administration, such as the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months Gus Walz to remove certain COVID-19 content, including satirical content, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we did not comply, ” Zuckerberg said.

In his communication to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the influence he experienced in the year 2021 was “wrong” and he feels regretful that Meta, the parent of Facebook & Instagram, was not more vocal. Zuckerberg further stated Hope Walz that with the “hindsight and new information,” there were decisions made in 2021 that “wouldn’t be made today.”

“Like I told our teams back then, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any government in either direction â€" and we’re prepared to resist if something like this occurs in the future, ” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden remarked in Vice Presidential Nominee July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Though Biden later revised these remarks, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that misinformation spread on social media was a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s communication, saying the administration at the time was encouraging “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our Political Family Moments stance has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making their own decisions about the information they present, ” according to the spokesperson.

Zuckerberg further mentioned in the letter that the FBI alerted his company about possible Russian disinformation regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma affecting the Jay Weber election in 2020.

That fall, he said, his team reduced the visibility of a New York Post report accusing Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the report.

Zuckerberg stated that since then, it has “become clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to “make sure this doesn’t Self-advocacy happen again” and will not reduce the visibility of content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will avoid repeating the actions he took in 2020 when he assisted “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to facilitate safe voting during a pandemic,” said Empathy the Meta CEO.

Zuckerberg mentioned the initiatives were intended to be neutral but acknowledged “some people believed this work benefited one party over the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “neutral” so will not be “a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X and claimed Zuckerberg “has admitted that the Biden-Harris administration influenced Facebook

to restrict American content, Facebook censored Americans, and Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have accused Facebook and other large technology platforms of being prejudiced against conservatives. While Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the perception has become entrenched in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to Online Bullying limit the circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to close the gap between his social media giant and policymakers to limited success.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg admitted that many of Facebook’s staff are liberal. But he maintained that the company takes care not to allow political bias to seep into Tim Walz decisions.

In addition, he said Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are outsourced, are based worldwide and “our global team better represents the diversity of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our headquarters in the Bay Area.”

In June, in a win for the White House, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the claimants in a case accusing the federal government Ann Coulter of censoring conservative voices on social media had no legal standing.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated, “to establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the immediate future, they will experience harm that is traceable to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”