In a letter to Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Meta Platforms founder Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured Meta’s team for months to censor certain content ranging from humor and satire related to the COVID-19 pandemic to articles the administration thought might hurt its reputation. 

Now Zuckerberg regrets bowing to what he calls pressure from the Biden administration to “censor” and demote content on Facebook and Instagram.

Platforms walk a fine line when it comes to censoring content. Demoting a story from a credible news organization that was once considered disinformation could destroy the credibility of a platform when the information has been revealed to be accurate. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has undergone similar scrutiny, and has pushed back from the start.

Zuckerberg also said Facebook demoted a New York Post article reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The company sent the story to fact checkers, and has since discovered the reporting was not Russian disinformation.

“We should not have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote, and explained how the company has since changed its policies.

Past political donations from Zuckerberg, who plans to sit out this election cycle, did not seem to benefit his companies.

Zuckerberg did not donate directly to Biden’s 2020 campaign, federal campaign finance records show, but the Associated Press reports that he and his wife Priscilla Chan donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations that distributed grants to state and local governments to help them with the 2020 election during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political campaigns are increasingly being bankrolled by billionaires, according to Barron’s, and much of it is going to advertising. Harris’ team has outspent Trump’s in the past month by more than $50 million — at $246.3 million to $192 million, respectively, according to NPR.

This campaign cycle is being bankrolled by a handful of billionaires and some hundreds of millionaires. The data found on OpenSecrets suggests that so far this year, major donations make up 16% of all contributions, up from 14.6% in 2022 and 9.5% in 2020.

Zuckerberg’s contributions during the last presidential election cycle were donated through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is designed to be non-partisan, spread across urban, rural and suburban communities to ensure that local elections have the resources they need. 

“I know some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter to Jordan. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another, or even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”