Why did Zuckerberg confess now?

ON many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information-sharing are reluctant to admit it.

- JEFFREY A TUCKER

The Fed admits no fault in inflation, and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. And yet everyone else does know already, and more and more so. This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. In his letter to Congressional investigators, Zuckerberg flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now. ‘In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain covid-19 content, including humour 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. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.’ A few clarifications: the censorship began much earlier than that; from March 2020 at the very least, if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and l