On April 9th, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reminding him of a subpoena in search of communications between Meta, the FBI, and “alleged foreign influence or election integrity.”
Jordan’s office subsequently released a “Facebook Files” series, revealing documents showing Meta executives worrying about “continued pressure . . . including from the White House” to remove content.
Zuckerberg this week sent a letter that, in a country with a functioning news media, would have major ramifications.
Not in direct response to Jordan’s April query, it appears to have been sent at Zuckerberg’s own volition, and is filled with passages deeply embarrassing to authorities. The first is about pressure to “censor” — specifically “censor,” not “moderate” or “exercise oversight”:
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a bit of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree . . . I believe the government was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
He also addressed Meta’s blocking in 2020 of The New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, after being warned by the FBI:
“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. 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. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Zuckerberg’s letter is a stiff poke in the eye to authorities, who brought this on themselves.
While Jordan has been applying steady pressure to Meta and other platforms for years, pro-censorship authorities of late have been cracking the whip on firms like Zuckerberg’s with increased ferocity.
This past weekend, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France for failure to roll over with sufficiently canine enthusiasm for European authorities.
Durov has things in common with Zuckerberg. He was known originally for founding V Kontakte, a Russian version of Facebook.
His arrest was based on a new enforcement principle also implicit in US government dealings with firms like Meta.
Law-enforcement officials want CEOs like Durov and Zuckerberg to police their platforms as governments want, or assume criminal responsibility for the behavior or disfavored speech of their customers. Involuntary deputization is a bitter pill for any industry leader to swallow.
Like other tech CEOs, Zuckerberg finds himself between a rock and a hard place. From one side, he sees subpoenas and investigations of censorship.
From the other, he faces strident demands on content from authorities whose idea of “accountability” has gone beyond crippling penalties to detention.
This is a classic Hobson’s choice.
Between complying with an investigation into government overreach and having to bend over forever for rapacious authorities who are also bone-stupid groupthinkers who’d surely destroy firms like Facebook if left to their devices (hint: customers won’t knowingly rush to sign up to be spied on and fed political propaganda), any CEO with an instinct for self-preservation will take the first door every time.
Zuckerberg could keep rolling over, ceding more and more control of Meta to government goons, or he could try to convince officials to back off by handing out sample doses of pain.
In that context, the letter makes sense.
Officials surely know the Meta CEO has bloodier material to release if he wants. Might this sneak peek incentivize them to at least let Meta sit out the coming election cycle?
It’s not an accident that Zuckerberg closed his letter to Jordan with a simple message, which read like it was written for another audience:
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or even appear to be playing a role.”
There are potent warnings in the letter, the most obvious being the “reporting was not Russian disinformation” portion.
On August 6, 2020, the FBI briefed Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, warning both that by investigating the Hunter Biden/Burisma story, they were advancing a “Russian disinformation” campaign.
Worse, government sources subsequently leaked news of that briefing to the Washington Post, which then reported that the Republican Senators had been given a “defensive briefing” by the FBI in part to see “how they respond” to being informed their investigation was seen as advancing Russian interests.
“They’re now on notice,” is how former FBI official-turned-media-sleazeball Frank Figliuzzi put it.
Zuckerberg’s letter touches on this larger story. The FBI involved itself in electoral politics by lying to business leaders and Congress about the origin of the Burisma tale.
Senators Johnson and Grassley were bluntly threatened, informed that the FBI considered their investigation to be in service of a Russian plot and put “on notice” that their behavior going forward would be monitored.
Was Facebook similarly “warned”?
What would that record look like?
What would Zuckerberg say about it, if he could give a frank and extended interview?
The media won’t talk about this censorship, because reporting is done in herds, and no one wildebeest can break formation without screwing things up for the others.
So they’ll all hold the line, until they all stop holding the line.
This is why a multi-billionaire like Zuckerberg, a human supertanker whose tiniest move causes market-disrupting fluctuations in his company’s share price, is able to correct himself faster than mere line reporters for media companies.
Governments can’t allow the public to have a debate about whether or not they are “censoring” people, which is why everyone who’s made claims in that direction, from Durov to Elon Musk to Glenn Greenwald to Max Blumenthal to me, has been tarred with the Hitler-of-the-month treatment in the press and dismissed as quacks, Trump supporters, or both.
Zuckerberg putting “censor” in writing forces the media to start adding the Meta CEO to their already bloated list of Putin-loving right-wing fabulists.
This technique is already stretched beyond the limits of plausibility, and a full defection of Zuckerberg — whose internal analysts surely have a more accurate read on the population’s leanings than any poll agency — would make continued dismissals of censorship claims all but impossible.
Were Zuckerberg to give full evidence to someone like Jordan, it would make the Twitter Files look like a mild appetizer.
Some who were involved with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case on digital censorship are a little frosty today, irritated that Zuckerberg’s admissions came too late to help make their public case.
As someone who dealt with frustration trying to roll the same story uphill, and whose own articles are frequently vaporized on Meta without explanation, I understand, but choose to look on the bright side.
Zuckerberg’s letter can only be good news. Our idiot ruling junta finally pushed too far, and a man moved to offer authorities a taste of embarrassment can surely be convinced to serve the whole meal.
Mr. Zuckerberg, can we hear the rest?
Excerpted with permission from Racket News.
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