by Veronica Witkowski
All views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board, the Macaulay Messenger, or CUNY Macaulay Honors College.
In late August of 2024, Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that in 2021, the Biden Administration pressured Meta to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” Zuckerberg is the CEO and co-founder of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This revelation comes at a time when many Americans are beginning to consider what role a social media company should have in regulating the content on its site, especially in the face of free speech concerns.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Meta implemented a policy that involved removing “misinformation during public health emergencies,” defining misinformation as something public health officials asserted could increase the chance of “imminent physical harm.” Claims that were subject to removal included those citing the dangers of vaccines, or those downplaying the severity of the disease. Posts that did not fall under one of the 80 claims subject to removal were “fact-checked, labeled, or demoted,” meaning that Meta added additional clarifying information to the posts or decreased how often these posts appeared on the other users’ feeds.
In 2023, however, a study found that instead of decreasing anti-vaccine content, Meta’s COVID misinformation policies actually increased the severity and polarization of this content. As mentioned earlier, Zuckerberg also came out recently saying that high-ranking members of the Biden administration pushed Meta to censor content regarding what they considered to be misinformation about the pandemic, even going as far as to include “humor and satire.” Though many of us may have no problem with removing clearly false statements about things such as the COVID vaccine causing people to become magnetic, and many of us may want online information to be approved by “public health experts,” the excessive severity of Meta’s misinformation policies are severe impediments to free speech and the free exchange of ideas in our society.
Although social media companies are not bound by the First Amendment in the same way as the government is, the government’s attempt to pressure companies such as Meta to censor certain content is an indirect way to impose content-based restrictions on speech. Though one can argue that people are not forced to engage with a particular social media site and can choose to use a different site that does not consider their views misinformation, certain social media sites are so heavily used that it may be hard to find an alternative. Meta, for example, boasted that almost 4 billion people used at least one of their main platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp) in the last quarter of 2023. Additionally, over half of U.S. adults reported sometimes or often getting their news from social media. Social media is an essential forum for the exchange of ideas and dissemination of information and should be held to high standards regarding free speech.
If a platform with such a wide reach and influence censors a particular viewpoint or group, especially at the behest of government officials, an extremely dangerous precedent is set for future speech. Meta’s COVID content regulation was developed with executive branch officials, blurring the boundary between an individual social media company and the government. It is easy to see how this could become dangerous, as “misinformation” could develop to apply to topics beyond public health, giving social media companies a rationale to suppress certain opinions, as they are protected from many First Amendment challenges the government would not be protected from.
Since 2021, Meta has scaled back some of its misinformation policies, especially around COVID-19. However, they maintain a policy on misinformation, saying that they will remove content “likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm [or] to directly contribute to interference with the functioning of political processes.” They also try to prevent other types of misinformation through a focus on “slowing the spread” of the content.
Meta and other social media sites have also been criticized for their apparent censorship of conservatives, criticisms of Facebook, pro-Palestinian content, and more. The platform also banned the account of former president Donald Trump after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Although the ban has since been removed, the situation nevertheless illustrates the broad power of social media companies to interfere with political discourse in an arena accessed by billions of people. The contemporary importance of social media as a source of information and discussion warrants careful protection of speech and expression, regardless of political perspective.
