OPINION: Zuckerberg’s free-speech ‘mea culpa’ is a sleight of hand

Mark Zuckerberg has been attracting heat this week over what some saw as a capitulation, an attempt to appease Republicans ahead of a potential second Donald Trump presidency by throwing himself under the bus.

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Meta Platforms Inc. founder said the company had “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today” with regards to taking down or demoting COVID-related content at the behest of Biden administration officials.

“Big win for free speech,” claimed the marauding Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who for years now has been using his power to concoct the fairy tale of an anti-conservative bias on social platforms. He took the apparent mea culpa as a significant victory for his committee’s investigation.

But in reality, Zuckerberg is bending Jordan’s committee to his own benefit: repackaging old apologies or statements and taking the chance to shore up his company’s defenses against undue government pressure in the future — no matter who ends up in the White House in January.

“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Jordan’s investigation began with a desired conclusion before working backward to pick up whatever shred of questionable evidence it could find to support it, contorting acceptable acts of social network governance into high crimes against freedom of speech. The committee’s efforts have achieved little other than noisy headlines.

With his letter, Zuckerberg gives Jordan his “I told you so” moment, a chance to look as if he’s achieved something. But the letter’s critical admissions had been made publicly long ago. In 2022, for instance, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan how Meta came to bury a story regarding Biden’s son Hunter — a move made in response to a direct warning from the FBI. Zuckerberg said it “sucks” to get decisions like that wrong. (Twitter, it’s worth noting, made the same call in response to the same government warning. It was, all around, a bad day in the complicated history of content moderation — though I have yet to see a shred of evidence that companies did not act in good faith.)

In July 2023, when a federal judge banned government agencies from interacting with social networks, Meta expressed its concern over the degree of “jawboning” it had been subjected to by members of the Biden administration to remove misinformation related to COVID.

Now, as I wrote at the time, there is ample acceptable reason for government officials to approach social networks with concerns over content, particularly material that, as was the case here, was seeking to dissuade Americans from receiving vaccinations. But the question here isn’t whether Meta could do more to combat misinformation — it always can. The question is whether the communications of White House staff — a back channel through which Meta employees were peppered with aggressive emails and implied threats — were appropriate. They were not.

The Supreme Court eventually threw out the case over a lack of standing — the correct decision, given that Meta’s removal of posts couldn’t be linked to actual harm to the plaintiffs. However, Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent rightly highlighted the risk of a chilling effect from jawboning. Meta staff members knew angering the White House on topic A (COVID-19) could influence relations when handling topic B (say, a dispute with the EU).

So it’s easy to see why Meta wants no more of this. We shouldn’t either. If the ruling party wants to slide into the inboxes of Zuckerberg or his lieutenants come January, the company can now confidently point to the declarations of Jordan and others who say such behavior is officially unacceptable.

Zuckerberg’s letter is more evidence that the 40-year-old has gained considerable wisdom in his years as a regular Capitol Hill punching bag. He’s given Jordan his hollow victory lap while giving up nothing his company hadn’t already surrendered. I’d call that capitalizing, not capitulating.

Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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