A conversation made public on Tuesday, August 27, which directly attacks the Biden presidency. In a letter sent to the chairman – Republican – of the Judiciary Committee of the American House of Representatives, Mark Zuckerberg launched into a major mea culpa for the management of disinformation on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic. “In 2021, senior officials in 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 lot of frustration with our teams when we disagreed,” wrote the boss of the Meta group in his missive.
“I believe the government pressure was a mistake, and I regret that we were not more forthcoming about it,” Zuckerberg wrote, assuring that he had made choices that, “with hindsight and new information at our disposal, we would not make today.”
This message delighted Republican elected officials, who regularly accuse social networks of censoring their opinions. “A great victory for freedom of expression,” reacted the X account of the House Judiciary Committee, stating that “the Biden-Harris administration has ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Americans.” Another supporter: Elon Musk, a fervent opponent of the slightest restriction on freedom of expression and ever closer to Donald Trump. “Whatever the reason, this is a step in the right direction,” he said on his social network X, seeing behind this censorship a “violation of the First Amendment.”
The White House was quick to defend itself, saying in a statement that “when faced with a deadly pandemic, this administration has encouraged responsible action to protect the public health and safety of all. Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe technology companies and private actors must consider the effects of their actions on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
Between Trump and Zuckerberg, a tumultuous personal history…
This letter looks like a signal sent by Mark Zuckerberg to the Republican clan, three months before the American elections. Because to say that relations between Donald Trump and the boss of Meta are frosty is an understatement. As early as 2017, the former American president accused Facebook of being “anti-Trump”. In 2020, when Mark Zuckerberg was strongly accused of a certain indulgence towards the American head of state and his outrageous remarks, the boss of the Meta group reacted by saying he was “deeply shaken and disgusted by President Trump’s divisive and incendiary rhetoric”.
But the breakup was definitively consumed after the assault on the Capitol in January 2021, following which Donald Trump’s account was suspended from Facebook, until January 2023. A ban that the three-time candidate for the American presidential election still has stuck in his craw. “All of a sudden, I went from number 1 to nobody,” he said in an interview with the American media Bloomberg last July.
This letter does not stop at the issue of Covid-19, but addresses several other subjects that are particularly close to the hearts of Republican elected officials. The first: the case of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. While Facebook had deleted a press article due to suspicions of “Russian disinformation”, pending verification by fact-checking services, Mark Zuckerberg claims that it was “made clear that this post had no connection to Russia, and that in retrospect, we should not have deleted this article”.
Another point: Mark Zuckerberg’s funding for associations aimed at supporting the American electoral system. While the American billionaire had paid through his foundation nearly 400 million dollars during the last presidential election – aimed in particular at purchasing protections to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in polling stations or equipment for processing postal ballots – this financial support had been the target of intense criticism from the Republican camp, accusing it of being partisan and biased in favor of the Democrats. This subject was one of Donald Trump’s main hobby horses, who still affirmed in a post on his social network Truth Social last July that he would jail “election fraudsters” if re-elected, citing Mark Zuckerberg by name.
For the 2024 presidential election, the Meta boss assures us: he “does not intend to make a similar contribution”. Assuring that these donations had a “non-partisan” goal, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that “some people think that this work benefited one party rather than the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role” in the election, he justifies, granting another point to the Trumpist camp.
…and major commercial issues
From start to finish, this letter therefore seems to be part of an attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to appease Donald Trump. A strategy also reinforced by his reaction following the attempted assassination of the Republican candidate last July, describing it as “badass” – to understand cool -, saying that it was “difficult not to be moved by this spirit and this fight”.
But if the boss of the Meta group is trying to smooth things over with Trump, it may also be a good thing because a crucial issue for him could well completely change depending on the outcome of the presidential election next November: the TikTok case. Because if the former president had initially been a fervent fighter against the Chinese social network, the latter has drastically changed his mind recently, now opposing its ban on American soil. And this, in particular for one reason: his refusal to offer such a gift to the boss of Meta. “If TikTok is no longer there, there is still Facebook and Instagram. And that, you know, is Zuckerberg,” he insisted in his interview with Bloomberg.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the end of TikTok on American soil could only have positive consequences, particularly for his social network Instagram, which aims to be his main competitor. And if publicly, the American billionaire has never directly supported the ban on the Chinese social network, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2020 revealed that the Meta boss had played a leading role with Donald Trump in raising concerns about TikTok. As a good business leader, Mark Zuckerberg knows: having an enemy against him in the White House, no matter how wild he may be, will not do him any good.