Free speech and potential censorship are at the heart of two separate tech stories that are dominating headlines around the world as we kick off the new week.
Following the arrest in Paris over the weekend of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, which quickly turned into a flashpoint about free speech, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter on Monday to Republican congressman Jim Jordan that ventured into related territory. Zuckerberg’s letter made news, specifically, as it relates to censorship demands from the Biden White House during the Covid pandemic, and it’s worth reading in its entirety (which you can do so here).
The Facebook co-founder, in short, now says that the administration was wrong to pressure his companies to censor certain Covid-related content (“including humor and satire”). And that Meta was wrong to comply with those requests as fully as it did.
In 2021, Zuckerberg writes, “senior officials from 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 didn’t agree.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own those decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today” (emphasis added).
My take: Obviously, this is the right thing to say now — now, being the big caveat. Regrettably, the damage stemming from certain aspects of the pandemic response has already been done and will probably be long-lasting.
No one, for example, should have needed the benefit of hindsight to surmise that making people’s lives “difficult” (in Dr. Fauci’s words) in order to prod them to get vaccinated was probably not the ideal approach. Or that forcing people to stay home from work, church, and school so that they don’t inadvertently infect grandma — while at the same time allowing popular political protests to take place — kind of strained credulity.
Zuckerberg’s new remarks about Covid censorship speak to one of the most under-appreciated side effect of the pandemic — namely, the detrimental co-mingling of public health and ideology, which you don’t have to be a genius to see will make the next pandemic even harder to bring under control.
