By Kurt Wagner

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., claimed that Facebook was “pressured” by the U.S. government to censor content related to Covid-19 during the global pandemic and that he regrets the company’s decision to comply with the demands.

“For months in 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. And while it was Meta’s decision whether to remove content, he continued, “The administration’s pressure was wrong, and I regret that we did not talk about it more openly.”

During the pandemic, Facebook officials drew the ire of critics of lockdowns, vaccines and mask mandates for deleting certain posts on the grounds that they contained misinformation about the virus or otherwise violated the company’s policies. In total, Facebook has deleted more than 20 million pieces of content in just over a year. Zuckerberg joins other social media executives, including Jack Dorsey, former CEO of blogging platform Twitter, in lamenting past instances of content moderation that they believe went too far.

There is a growing global debate about how far social media companies should go in controlling their users’ comments, images and other content. Some platforms believe they should hold back when it comes to telling users what they can and cannot say online, while some governments say an overly laissez-faire attitude can lead to criminal behavior. French officials arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov over the weekend, claiming the company had failed to sufficiently combat crime on the messaging app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material.

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election, in which Vice President Kamala Harris will face former President Donald Trump, Zuckerberg is also trying to appear nonpartisan. “My goal is to be neutral and not to play a role one way or the other – or even to appear to play a role,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, the contents of which were posted on the House Judiciary Committee’s Facebook page and confirmed by Meta. He wrote in reference to contributions made to support election infrastructure during the last presidential campaign.