It's tempting to say "Better late than never," but in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's case, it's probably not all that much better. It sure would have been nice if he'd been willing to come clean about this when it was actually happening and it could have markedly improved the situation. We're addressing a bombshell letter that Zuckerberg sent to the House Judiciary Committee admitting that Biden administration officials repeatedly pressured Meta to censor content related to the coronavirus pandemic. He also admits that it was "wrong" to suppress content related to Hunter Biden's laptop right before the 2020 election and he has some "regrets" about doing so. Thanks for the heads up, Mark, but we'd already figured most of that out thanks to the Twitter Files. (NY Post)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content and acknowledged it was wrong to stifle The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.

In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.

The content the Biden administration requested that Meta take down included “humor and satire,” according to the Facebook founder, and he said he regrets complying with certain demands.

Take note of the way that Zuckerberg says that he regrets complying "with certain demands." Not all of the demands, mind you. Just certain ones. Would Mr. Zuckerberg care to be a bit more specific about the items falling into each bucket? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen. He concludes by saying that things will be different going forward if the government makes similar requests.

The government-requested censorship primarily falls into two categories here. One deals with supposed "misinformation" related to the government's response to the COVID pandemic. That was almost certainly the worst and potentially did the most damage. Anyone, including prominent virologists and other doctors who expressed the slightest skepticism over the early testing of the new mRNA vaccines, had their content "suppressed." Suggesting that the virus might have broken out of a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than arising from people eating raw bats and pangolin at a wet market was similarly silenced. The same applies to dubious policies involving social distancing and all the rest. 

In the months and years that followed, we learned that the critics were far closer to being on the mark and those toeing the company line for the White House were wrong. How many additional lives could have been saved? How quick would the recovery have been if we hadn't tanked our entire economy? How many children's educations and social development skills wouldn't have been set back by years?

The other category of supposed "misinformation" that Meta agreed to censor dealt with Hunter Biden's infamous laptop. In the letter, Zuckerberg flatly admits that the reporting on that story "was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” This is admittedly a very different type of damage than dealing with a potentially deadly virus spreading across the world, but it's still very bad. People in the Biden administration as well as in the intelligence community knew perfectly well that the story was real, but they lied about it anyway. They got Meta to bury and discredit the information and it was all knowingly done in an attempt to influence the election. Meta went along with the plan whether they knew it was a bogus cover story or not, so they bear a share of the blame. Now it's time for the House Oversight Committee to do their job and figure out how to monitor such things and ensure that it doesn't happen again.