Mark Zuckerberg Ingratiates Himself With U.S. Republican Politicians ⇥ ft.com

The extremely normal U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary posted a letter sent from Mark Zuckerberg to Chairman Jim Jordan.¹ In it, Zuckerberg says Meta felt “pressured” by the Biden administration to more aggressively moderate users’ posts during the COVID-19 pandemic, that the administration was “wrong” for doing so, and says he “regret[s] that we were not more outspoken about it”.

This is substantially not news. Ryan Tracy of the Wall Street Journal reported last June the existence of these grievances within Meta. To be clear, this is contrition over Meta’s reluctance to more forcefully respond to government complaints about platform moderation. Nevertheless, it set off a wave of coverage about the Biden administration’s social media complaints during the pandemic.

Look a little closer, though, and it is a fairly embarrassing message which comes across less as a “big win for free speech”, as the Committee called it, and more like sophistry. Zuckerberg admits Meta decided its own moderation policy. It chose which actions to take, including issuing a direct response to the administration at the time. The government’s actions were also not as chilling as they sound. Indeed, many of the same issues were raised in Murthy v. Missouri, and were grossly misrepresented to portray U.S. officials as censorial and threatening instead of tense conversations made during a global pandemic.

But I wanted to draw your attention to something specific in Zuckerberg’s letter, as summarized by Hannah Murphy, of the Financial Times:

Zuckerberg also said he would no longer make a contribution to support electoral infrastructure via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic group, as he had previously done. The donations totalled more than $400mn and were made to non-profit groups including the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life. They were intended to make sure local election jurisdictions would have appropriate voting resources during the pandemic, he said. But he added that they had been interpreted as “benefiting one party over the other”.

Zuckerberg does not say who, specifically, interpreted his foundation’s contributions toward promoting information about voting as a somehow partisan effort, nor does Zuckerberg question the validity of these ridiculous complaints. But his concerns about the appearance of personal partisanship do not seem to carry over to his company. To name just one example, Meta is listed as a sponsor of the 2024 Canada Strong and Free Regional Networking Conference, a conservative activist event which this year is hosting Chris Rufo. That sponsorship is what kicked me into writing this whole thing instead of being satisfied with a couple of snarky posts. How is it that Meta will happily contribute to an explicitly partisan group, but Zuckerberg’s foundation promoting the general concept of voting is beyond the pale?

This letter is Zuckerberg ingratiating himself with lawmakers investigating a supposed conspiracy between tech companies, watchdog organizations, and an opposition political party. It is politically beneficial to a specific party and viewpoint. For Zuckerberg, whose objective is nominally to “not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role”, this seems like a dishonest choice.