What Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Jim Jordan means

Very briefly:

• Zuckerberg says that in 2021, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor some posts about the Covid pandemic — pressure that Zuckerberg now says was misguided. Zuckerberg says the Biden White House was not ultimately responsible for any actions Facebook took because “we own our decisions.” But he has some regrets about some of them today.
• Zuckerberg says that in 2020, Facebook “temporarily downgraded” a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been.
• Zuckerberg says that unlike the 2020 election, his Chan Zuckerberg charity won’t be spending money to help people register to vote. He wrote that he thought it was a decent thing to do four years ago, “to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.”

In conservative online circles, starting with Jordan himself, Zuckerberg’s letter/mea culpa should be a very big deal: “A big win for free speech,” as Jordan’s judicial commission tweeted.

But if you look more closely at what Zuckerberg did and didn’t say, you might come to the conclusion I did: that Zuckerberg gave Jordan enough attention to claim a political victory — but without bringing Meta further. issues while defending against a federal antitrust lawsuit.

Let’s penetrate. The first item in the letter, about the Biden White House pressuring Facebook during the pandemic, is by far the most politically significant.

For years, conservatives like Jordan have argued that Big Tech companies like Facebook have an anti-Republican bias. And here you finally have a Big Tech CEO saying that a Democratic administration really tried to influence what happened on the platform. And that Zuckerberg now regrets some of the calls his team made about Covid content during the election.

People who pay attention to Silicon Valley and its internal struggles for moderation on platforms like Facebook will know that Zuckerberg’s comments are pretty tame. It is well established that various government agencies – including the Trump White House – were talking to all platforms about the Covid posts, among other things. And that there has been an industry-wide pendulum swing against some of the platform moderation efforts that have built up over the years.

Still, there’s something to be said for the guy who runs one of the biggest platforms to say these things out loud to lawmakers.

Will this sway an undecided voter months before the 2024 election? I don’t think so. But the Republicans will try to make it so.

The letter becomes significantly less important after that. Zuckerberg’s pledge not to fund voter registration efforts doesn’t seem very important now that the pandemic has subsided. And while he acknowledges that those donations were politicized by “some people” — which would include Jordan and other Republicans — he says his only regret about them is that they were politicized.

But the most telling thing about Zuckerberg’s letter is the laptop anecdote.

If you’re a normal person, the “Hunter Biden laptop story” probably doesn’t mean much to you. If you spend time with a certain strain of conservative, it means a lot: It’s a laptop containing all sorts of embarrassing emails and documents created by Joe Biden’s son, which was initially dismissed by many as a 2020 election hoax ( for context: The Wall Street Journal, which had first broken the story, ended up passing when the Post ran the story, with one of its authors removed from the article).

Concern that the laptop story was some kind of hack or disinformation campaign was why Twitter (support me here) prevented users from sharing links to the New York Post’s coverage of the story in October 2020 — a dramatic overreach for which the company later apologized for.

But now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook has admitted it also made it harder for its users to get to that story. Aha!

You just don’t need a congressional committee to figure it out. Because Facebook told the world it does this, the way it does this.

Here’s Facebook representative Andy Stone on October 14, 2020.

What if you were busy then — what with the pandemic and the election and all — and you missed it?

No problem. Facebook executives have talked about this several times. Like in 2022, when Zuckerberg went on one of the world’s most popular podcasts and told Joe Rogan why “it sucks” that he got the laptop story wrong. “When we screw up something we shouldn’t, that’s the worst.”

As with platform decisions, perhaps well-intentioned but certainly misguided, making it difficult to find the New York Post’s coverage of the laptop story wasn’t great. But it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as the Twitter call, which is why you don’t hear many people obsessing over it today.

But “not many people know about something” is not nearly the same as “Mark Zuckerberg admitting to something.” The previous statement is true. The second is not, but it is much more interesting.

Which, again, seems to be the point of the whole exercise: Zuckerberg was trying to give Jim Jordan and his party a win — while giving them very little.