Mark Zuckerberg has just had to forfeit several large portions of his weakness.

And a little political excitement was not on the agenda.

As the Wall Street Journal first reported, the CEO of Facebook and Meta expressed regret over such serious issues as government-sponsored censorship and freedom of speech.

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It’s good that Zuck is taking on some responsibility, but it’s kind of too late. By about three years.

The admissions, made in a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, are a major victory for Republicans. The former Harvard prodigy usually remains on the defensive and makes vague promises of future reforms.

After the pandemic broke out, Zuckerberg wrote, senior officials in the Biden administration and the White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed deep frustration with our teams when we did not agree.”

That’s an important distinction. Biden’s pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could, and sometimes did, say no. But most of the time, the giant social media site simply backed down.

And Facebook had a publicly announced agenda: to encourage millions of people to get vaccinated against Covid.

Zuckerberg said the government pressure was “wrong, and I regret that we didn’t talk about it more openly.” His company “made some decisions that, in hindsight and with new information, we wouldn’t make today… I firmly believe that we shouldn’t compromise our content standards because of pressure from any government from any direction – and we’re ready to fight back if something like this happens again.”

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I don’t know: How confident are you that Facebook would take a public stance on a sensitive issue today?

A Biden White House spokesman, using legalese that did not really address Zuck’s allegations, said the White House had “encouraged responsible action to protect public health and safety.” “Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe that technology companies and other private actors should consider the impact of their actions on the American people while making independent decisions about the information they present.”

Two years ago, a Free Press reporter investigating the Twitter Files found that both the Trump and Biden administrations “directly pressured Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content as they wished.”

One document mentioned the White House technology chief who “led the Trump administration’s calls for help to technology companies to combat disinformation.”

The article also said that Facebook, Google and Microsoft met with Trump officials “on a weekly basis” to discuss “general trends” at the companies. That sounds like an understatement.

But Trump was also a victim. Just four hours after a 2020 campaign video was posted and garnered half a million views, Facebook took it down, saying it violated the social network’s policies against Covid disinformation.

The Trump camp had published an excerpt from a Fox interview in which the president said that children were “virtually immune” to the coronavirus. Most medical experts at the time disagreed.

“They have a much stronger immune system than we do,” Trump said. “They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.”

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A White House spokeswoman called the move at the time “further evidence of Silicon Valley’s blatant bias against this president, where the rules are enforced in only one direction.”

Zuckerberg, for his part, also made headlines about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

He told Jordan that Meta “should not have downgraded” an article about the laptop in the New York Post shortly before the 2020 election.

Let me stop here. “Demoted” is the jargon for suppressing a story, or blatantly burying a story so that few or no users see it. This happened after Twitter, as you’ll recall, blocked the post’s story entirely.

Trump’s allies gained access to the laptop from the Delaware computer store owner at a time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter dismissing the laptop story as a fabrication, and in a debate with Trump, Biden said the release of the emails bore “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Zuckerberg writes: “It has since been clarified that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight we should not have downgraded the story.”

Correct. And it took the New York Times and the Washington Post another year and a half to “authenticate” the contents of the laptop.

In the 2020 election, Zuck funded nonprofits to set up voting booths and equipment to sort mail-in ballots in the Covid era, which Republicans, who called it “Zuckerbucks,” argued with some justification that it unfairly favored Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he won’t repeat that effort this time around.

Trump said in a post last month: “All I can say is that if I am elected president, we will go after election fraudsters on a scale never seen before and we will put them in jail for a long time. We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!”

In his interview with me at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made his dislike of Facebook quite clear, even using it as a justification for abandoning his opposition to a ban on TikTok, arguing that it would only help Zuckerberg’s company.

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Some may dismiss this all as old news, as the events date back to the pandemic and the last election. But it raises fundamental questions that still resonate today, as Elon Musk’s support for Trump has caused many liberals to leave or largely turn away from X and join Threads, the Zuckerberg copycat site.

Politicians and interest groups regularly lobby the federal government, but when they use their considerable influence to put pressure on the tech giants – secretly, behind closed doors and shielded from the public – it is deeply troubling.