'Global South is lectured all the time': Sanjeev Sanyal after Zuckerberg says White House pressured Meta to censor Covid content

Economist Sanjeev Sanyal on Tuesday called Mark Zuckerberg's revelation about pressure from White House quite an admission. On Monday, Zuckerberg revealed that the White House in 2021 had repeatedly pressured Meta for months to censor certain Covid content.  

"Wow, this is quite an admission - and it is the Global South that is lectured all the time about "freedom"," Sanyal said, adding that he was even more interested in how Covid related information was constantly twisted. "What exactly is being hidden?"

In a letter to the Chairman of Committee on the Judiciary, the Meta CEO on Monday said that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured his firm 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". "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg said. 

In a separate situation, Zuckerberg revealed, the FBI warned Meta about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. He said when New York Post came out with a story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, Meta sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting
for a reply. 

"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers," Zuckerberg said. 

Aditya Pittie, entrepreneur and angel investor with interests in politics, said this revelation was shocking but not surprising! "All hail the purveyors of free speech!"