RFK is ‘determined for consideration’: Howard Kurtz
‘MediaBuzz’ host Howard Kurtz explains why Vice President Kamala Harris ought to do a Fox Information interview and reacts to former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsing former President Trump on ‘The Story.’
Mark Zuckerberg simply needed to eat a number of giant helpings of crow.
And a few minor political flap wasn’t on the menu.
Because the Wall Road Journal first reported, the CEO of Fb and Meta expressed remorse on such weighty issues as government-induced censorship and free speech.
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It’s good for Zuck to just accept a point of duty, however it’s kinda too late. By about three years.
The admissions got here in a letter to Jim Jordan, the Home Judiciary chairman, and is a serious win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz child normally digs in defensively, with obscure guarantees of future reform.
After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White Home officers had “repeatedly pressured our groups for months to censor sure COVID-19 content material, together with humor and satire, and expressed lots of frustration with our groups after we didn’t agree.”
A side-by-side of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and U.S. President Joe Biden. (Getty Pictures)
That is a crucial distinction. The Biden stress ways didn’t all the time work. Fb might, and generally did, say no. However a lot of the time, the enormous social media website simply caved.
And Fb had a publicly proclaimed agenda: prodding hundreds of thousands of individuals to take Covid vaccines.
Zuckerberg stated the administration stress “was fallacious, and I remorse that we weren’t extra outspoken about it.” His firm “made some selections that, with the advantage of hindsight and new info, we wouldn’t make right now…I really feel strongly that we should always not compromise our content material requirements as a consequence of stress from any administration in both route — and we’re able to push again if one thing like this occurs once more.”
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I don’t know: How assured are you that Fb would publicly push again on some hot-button problem right now?
A Biden White Home spokesman, in lawyerly language that didn’t fairly reply to Zuck’s accusations, stated it had “inspired accountable actions to guard public well being and security…Our place has been clear and constant: we imagine tech corporations and different personal actors ought to bear in mind the consequences their actions have on the American individuals, whereas making impartial selections in regards to the info they current.”
Two years in the past, a Free Press reporter who examined the “Twitter Recordsdata” discovered that each the Trump and the Biden administrations “instantly pressed Twitter executives to average the platform’s pandemic content material in line with their needs.”
One doc talked about the White Home chief know-how officer, who “led the Trump administration’s requires assist from the tech corporations to fight misinformation.”
On this photograph illustration, a Fb emblem is seen on a pc display screen and a hand holding a medical syringe in entrance of it. (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Pictures/LightRocket through Getty Pictures)
The piece additionally stated that Fb, Google and Microsoft joined in “weekly” calls with the Trump officers to speak about “normal developments” on the corporations. Sounds euphemistic.
However Trump was additionally a sufferer. Simply 4 hours after a 2020 marketing campaign video was posted and drew a half million views, Fb took it down, saying it violated the social community’s coverage in opposition to Covid misinformation.
The Trump camp had posted a clip from a Fox interview wherein the president stated youngsters have been “nearly immune” from the coronavirus. Most medical specialists disagreed on the time.
“They’ve obtained a lot stronger immune methods than we do one way or the other for this,” Trump stated. “They don’t have an issue. They simply don’t have an issue.”
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A White Home spokeswoman on the time referred to as the transfer “one other show of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias in opposition to this president, the place the principles are solely enforced in a single route.”
Zuckerberg, for his half, additionally made information on the Hunter Biden laptop computer.
He advised Jordan that Meta “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Submit story in regards to the laptop computer shortly earlier than the 2020 election.
Let me cease proper there. Demoted is tech jargon for suppressing a narrative, blatantly burying it in order that few if any customers see it. This occurred after Twitter, as you’ll recall, completely blocked the Submit story.
Former President Trump arrives to talk at a marketing campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana, on Friday, Aug. 9. (AP/Rick Bowmer)
Trump allies obtained entry to the laptop computer from the Delaware laptop store proprietor, at a time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. Dozens of former intelligence officers signed a letter dismissing the laptop computer story as pretend, and in a debate with Trump, Biden stated the discharge of the emails had “all of the basic earmarks of a Russian info operation.”
Zuckerberg writes: “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and looking back, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Proper. And it took the New York Occasions and Washington Submit one other yr and a half to “authenticate” the laptop computer’s contents.
Within the 2020 election, Zuck funded nonprofits to arrange Covid-era voting cubicles and gear sorting mail-in ballots, which Republicans, calling it “Zuckerbucks,” argued with some justification that this unfairly benefited Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he received’t repeat the hassle this time.
Trump stated in a posting final month: “All I can say is that if I am elected president, we’ll pursue Election Fraudsters at ranges by no means seen earlier than, and they are going to be despatched to jail for lengthy durations of time. We already know who you might be. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, watch out!”
In his Mar-a-Lago interview with me, Trump made his distaste for Fb fairly clear, in truth utilizing it to justify dropping his opposition to banning TikTok, saying that will solely assist Zuckerberg’s firm.
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Now some might dismiss all this as outdated information, on condition that the occasions date to the pandemic and the final election. But it surely raises basic questions that proceed to reverberate right now, when Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump has prompted many liberals to depart or largely abandon X and be a part of Threads, the Zuckerberg copycat website.
Politicians and particular pursuits routinely foyer the federal authorities. However once they use their appreciable clout to stress tech giants – secretly, behind closed doorways, shielded from the general public – it’s deeply troubling.
