About Zuckerberg's Letter to Jim Jordan

Last month, following personal threats from Trump, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan apologizing for some of Facebook/Meta’s previous COVID-19 content moderation efforts and accusing the Biden administration of pressuring them to “censor certain COVID-19 content.”

This was celebrated by members of the Right, who hailed it as a win for “free speech” while ignoring that an estimated 232,000 Americans died preventable unvaccinated COVID-19 deaths while vaccine misinformation ran wild on right-wing and social media.

Zuckerberg’s letter supplied oxygen to the MAGA narrative that there is a concerted effort to “censor” them online. But it came on the heels of the Supreme Court knocking down the censorship lawsuit Murthy v. Missouri and Meta itself beating a censorship lawsuit brought forth by RFK Jr.‘s anti-vax Children’s Health Defense, both this summer.

Zuckerberg’s company entered the pandemic with a pre-existing political misinformation issue, as demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal that helped propel Trump to the White House in 2016. So it’s worth noting that the former lead psychologist from Cambridge Analytica was revealed in leaked internal messages to be coordinating COVID-19 anti-vax social media campaigns.

See today’s article in WhoWhatWhy.