As The Guardian reports: "The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic."
He put his regret in a letter to the staunch pressure-opposing House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jim Jordan.
Wrote Zuckerberg: "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."
The right, of course, has conflated "pressure" with "censor," which the White House did not and could not do. But of all the WH pressure campaigns on social media — the Trump administration did the same, for different reasons — Biden's was downright righteous. There's no way to know, but it probably saved many lives.
That, after all, was the administration's singular intent, which Jordan and his gang of witness-browbeating hooligans were dead-set against, merely because their partisan ignoramus who previously occupied the WH had wanted to treat the pandemic as just another flu.
Moving on, any C- political strategist can see that the purpose of Zuckerberg's letter transcended his billions of baseless worries about Biden. It was a "back-off" missive addressed to all future administrations. Mark can't be bothered with presidential concerns about pesky foreign foes polluting his site at election time or far-right terrorists posting recruitment lures.
But this is how Charlie Kirk — a close ally of Trump and grifter of several "TurningPointUSA" scams — interpreted the billionaire's letter. Or perhaps I should say this is how Charlie Kirk wanted his more than three million Trumpers to read it.
Mark Zuckerberg has access to billions of data points of the American public. A very plausible conclusion to draw from his letter to the House Judiciary Committee is that he is seeing the macro data and trends and is getting ahead of what he knows is coming in November.…
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 27, 2024
What Zuckerberg knows is coming in November. Thus his letter "was not so much a genuine regret as it was a pragmatic business decision." That's how Charlie concluded his tweet.
Kamala Harris' entry into the race rattled him to no end. Charlie thought he was on his way to a new White House, all gussied up in red, white and black. Like Trump, he didn't know how to handle the whole Harris upheaval. Not at first. Then he recalled what should have been unforgettable.
Ignore reality! Hey, that's the entire foundation of Trumpism. Why of course. A ding-ding-ding went off in Charlie's head and his feet again stood proudly on the foundation. Those polls? The polls, every one of them, showing Harris in the lead? Her momentum? A second bounce to come? A Democratic team with a governing agenda versus retribution?
Ignore it, all of it. Just tweet instead that Mark Zuckerberg knows what is coming in November — the glorious resurrection — and so he bowed to destiny. Now isn't that a lot easier and certainly more satisfying than acknowledging that Trump has big problems?
An existence of willful delusions. I really don't know how they can live like that.
It sounds like a lot of work and stress to live like that. To constantly be in deliberate denial and lying nonstop to get others to exist in a world of willful delusions.
Posted by: Anne J | August 28, 2024 at 09:31 AM