The Propaganda FilesMeta announced it would end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and move to an X-style Community Notes system. The company said its moderation had gone too far, and that it would relocate its trust and safety teams from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.
In a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg wrote that Biden White House officials had pressured Meta for months in 2021 to remove COVID-19 content, and that he regretted not being more outspoken. He also said Facebook should not have demoted the Hunter Biden laptop story and that he would not repeat his 2020 election-administration donations.
In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that neither the states nor the individual plaintiffs had standing to seek an injunction against the federal officials. The Court did not decide whether the government's contacts with Facebook and other platforms violated the First Amendment.
A Fifth Circuit panel upheld part of the injunction, finding that the White House and Surgeon General's office likely coerced or significantly encouraged platforms' moderation decisions, and that the CDC and FBI likely significantly encouraged them. A revised Oct. 3, 2023 opinion extended the injunction to CISA; the Supreme Court later reversed on standing.
Internal Facebook emails obtained by Rep. Jim Jordan and The Wall Street Journal showed company staff linking the 2021 lab-leak removal policy to pressure from the Biden administration. Other emails showed White House officials pressing Facebook on vaccine-related humor and hesitancy content.
Even as Facebook restricted some content, data showed right-leaning pages and outlets often dominated engagement and conservative news reached a large, distinct audience. This is the strongest evidence against claims that Facebook broadly suppressed conservatives.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, finding the states likely to prove that federal officials pressured platforms including Facebook to suppress protected speech. Higher courts later narrowed and then vacated the case on standing, and the Supreme Court majority called many of his factual findings 'clearly erroneous.'
Elvis Chan, an FBI agent in the San Francisco field office, was deposed under oath in Missouri v. Biden about the bureau's contacts with social media companies. He testified that the FBI met regularly with Facebook and other platforms ahead of the 2020 election, and that it warned them about possible state-sponsored 'hack-and-dump' operations like the 2016 DNC hack.
John Stossel sued Meta and Science Feedback for defamation over 'Missing Context' and 'Partly False' labels on two of his climate videos. A federal magistrate judge dismissed the case, ruling that the labels were subjective judgments protected as opinion, not provably false statements of fact.
On The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg said the FBI had warned Facebook to expect a Russian 'dump' of propaganda before the 2020 election. He said Facebook then reduced the distribution of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story while fact-checkers reviewed it.
No document, court record or testimony found shows that the CIA ran Facebook or directed its content decisions. What is documented is that Meta hired former CIA, FBI and other national-security staff into trust and safety roles, and that the FBI and DHS/CISA held regular contacts with the company.
The BMJ published an investigation on Nov. 2, 2021, reporting a whistleblower's allegations of data-integrity problems at a contractor running some of Pfizer's COVID vaccine trial sites. Facebook users who shared it saw a 'Missing Context' label from fact-checker Lead Stories, and the journal's editors wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg calling the fact-check 'inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.'
In February 2021, Facebook added the claim that 'COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured' to its list of COVID misinformation to remove. About four months later, as President Biden ordered an intelligence review of the virus's origins, Facebook said it would no longer remove that claim.
Facebook took down the page of the Great Barrington Declaration, the October 2020 statement by epidemiologists opposing broad lockdowns, saying only that it violated community standards. The authors say it was restored about a week later without explanation.
The day after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was blocking President Trump's accounts for at least two weeks, and the suspension became indefinite. The Oversight Board upheld it in May 2021 but rejected the open-ended penalty, Facebook set a two-year term, and Meta reinstated Trump in January 2023.
