Unpacking Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Congress on Biden and Facebook

Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared to express regret to Congress for not speaking up when the Biden administration pressured the social network to "censor" some COVID-19 posts during the pandemic.

He made these comments in an August 26 letter to Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Peter Kafka, Business Insider's chief media and technology correspondent, spoke with Brad Mielke on Wednesday's episode of "Start Here," ABC News' flagship daily news podcast, about the contents of Zuckerberg's letter, Facebook's approach to moderation and how tech companies collaborate with politicians.

START HERE: When you hear about misinformation, it can sound academic at best. Annoying at worst. But in recent years we have seen how powerful misinformation can be. How a series of false stories about the theft of an election can escalate into a riotous mob. How a war can be justified to the citizens of a country by saying, "Our neighbors should be invaded." And perhaps most dramatically, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only killed 7 million people and counting, but has also led to misinformation campaigns that have had long-lasting consequences. The US Surgeon General declared this abstract idea a very real risk. Let's bring in Peter Kafka, the chief correspondent for Business Insider, where he covers media and technology. Peter, we've heard Mark Zuckerberg apologize before. But he apologizes for doing too little as a company, right? Rarely for doing too much. What was this letter about? You may recall that at the height of the pandemic, sites like Facebook frantically tried to keep dangerous misinformation off their sites. This week, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee apologizing for doing just that.

KAFKA: Well, I'm not entirely sure what this letter is about. We can talk about what it says, but the apology that you're referring to is something specific. That's a pretty short letter that says, look, during the pandemic in 2020, 2021, the Biden White House - he mentions the Biden White House, I think that's important - reached out to us about a lot of things that they wanted us to remove around COVID-19 and a lot of the advice that they gave us, we didn't take.

But we still removed things that in retrospect we wish we hadn't. So he's saying both, "Hey, the White House shouldn't have approached us this way," which seems a little revisionist to me. But also, "We removed some things that in retrospect we wish we had kept." So that's the mea culpa part.

In addition to the COVID stuff that Mark Zuckerberg talks about, he mentions two other things. One of them is another apology. He says, look, in October of 2020, the New York Post ran what seemed at the time to be a very sketchy story about Hunter Biden's laptop, with some sort of implausible backstory about how it came out of a computer repair shop in Delaware and Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon brought it in, and it just seemed fake. And so we made it difficult for a while to find that story, and we shouldn't have done that.

So that was also a bad thing that we did. The point I'm making is that that was not a secret. Facebook had already said in October 2020 that they were doing that in real time, and they apologized for it multiple times after that. So there's nothing new there.

And finally, Zuckerberg says, look at myself through my charity with my wife, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, we personally spent about $400 million in 2020 through our charity to facilitate safe voting. There was a pandemic, we wanted people to know how to vote safely, how to vote remotely, etc.

START HERE: Well, I guess I want to know why. Why would you do this if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you've spent the last few years saying to everybody, "Hey, we're moderators of our community. We're trying to make the internet a safer place." And now in this letter, as you said to a Republican-led committee, you say that we have really overstepped the mark. We have been pressured, as we have received phone calls from the White House. I am sure that many companies have received phone calls from the White House advocating for their interests, and we should not have taken that advice, and we should have allowed everyone to say what they wanted. Why now?

That donation was then weaponized, really by Republicans. They said this was a way to influence the election on behalf of the Democrats. We don't think that's true at all. But we want to be neutral. And so we're not going to do that again this time. And there's no pandemic, so we don't have to do that.

KAFKA: You know, there are a lot of techies who initially thought, "We can ignore Washington and government in general and be on our own." And 20 or 30 years ago, that was a pretty common view in Silicon Valley.

And over the years, these large companies, which are almost entirely based in the US, end up saying, "Oh, we're actually beholden to US law, to foreign lawmakers, particularly in the EU. And we have to deal with all of these governments somehow. And so we have to spend a lot of time lobbying and getting our positions across and occasionally appearing before Congress to testify," that sort of thing.

The letter that Zuckerberg sent to Jim Jordan, Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee, he's been pushing this idea of ​​bias in tech for years. He has a lot of critics who say he's really harassing people, he's not looking for the truth.

But either way, I interpret that as Zuckerberg saying, look, this is a way to say very little. A lot, I've said it before. To apologize for something that I take the blame for, but I also blame the Democrats for. And I'll say this, the Republicans will say, "Look, look at the scalp - we got Mark Zuckerberg to apologize and blame Joe Biden. This is great."

And I think, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, if I say this to you, and I have a feeling he probably negotiated this with Jim Jordan and the committee, can we just go ahead and give me a free pass?

There's an ongoing conversation about what these big platforms - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. - should or shouldn't do with what's on their sites. And we could spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, these sites all start out very hands-off, doing very little in the way of moderation, as they get bigger, more valuable, more to lose, more people pay attention to them, they moderate more and more.

And that really came to a head in 2020. I think part of it was a response to the pandemic and the discussions about what is disinformation and what people should and shouldn't say about COVID. And part of it was because Elon Musk took over Twitter and said, 'I'm going to do as little moderation as possible.'

START HERE: Right, and that pendulum swing you're describing again, how real these effects can be in the long run, if they trickle down to regular users. OK, Peter Kafka from Business Insider, really illuminating. Thank you.

I think the pendulum and Silicon Valley is swinging back a little bit from, let's moderate a lot to maybe let's moderate less. But to be clear, if you're running one of these big internet companies, you're going to have to moderate stuff. You're going to be under enormous legal liability if you don't. If you don't want to moderate anything, don't run a big platform. And that's going to be the problem with Telegram and France.

Unpacking Mark Zuckerberg's letter to Congress about Biden and Facebook originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

KAFKA: Thank you for having me here.