• In a letter to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed the Biden Administration “repeatedly pressured” the company to crack down on COVID-19 disinformation on its platforms and that he regrets not being more outspoken about it. Zuckerberg also said Meta was wrong to have temporarily suppressed a 2020 New York Post story about a laptop belonging to then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Zuckerberg said Meta would no longer downgrade potentially false stories while it waits for fact-checkers to weigh in. Washington Post tech reporter Will Oremus explains what this means for the potential spread of misinformation this election cycle.
• And in headlines: Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a new indictment against former President Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz will sit for their first joint interview on CNN this week, and a federal judge in Texas halted a new Biden administration program designed to give undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens a more direct path to citizenship.

Show Notes:

• Check out Will’s article – https://tinyurl.com/mvzc694d
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• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

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TRANSCRIPT

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s Wednesday, August 28th. I’m Priyanka Aribindi.

Juanita Tolliver: And I’m Juanita Tolliver and this is What a Day. The show where we just learned that thanks to a special electronic ballot, astronauts are able to vote from space, Priyanka.

Priyanka Aribindi: This is great news for the two Americans who are currently stranded in space until next year. I don’t know, I mean, they’re stuck there, but they still get to decide what they’re coming back to. Maybe that’s how we should be voting. What kind of world do we want them to come back to? 

Juanita Tolliver: Oh my gosh. Yeah. [music break] On today’s show, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he will meet with President Biden next month to discuss a plan to end the war with Russia. Plus, special counsel Jack Smith is at it again. He filed a new indictment against former President Donald Trump for efforts to overturn the 2020 election. 

Priyanka Aribindi: But first, with just about two months to go until Election Day, the majority of Americans say that they are worried about the potential for misinformation to spread online and influence the way that people vote. So it came as a surprise on Tuesday when Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a letter from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he said that he regretted some of the previous efforts that the company has taken to combat disinformation on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. You heard that correctly. He regrets the efforts they took to combat disinformation. 

Juanita Tolliver: Yeah. In his letter to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that in 2021, officials in the Biden administration, quote, “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid 19 content.” Zuckerberg went on to say that any content moderation decision the company made was ultimately Meta’s decision alone. But he added, quote, “I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret we were not more outspoken about it.” 

Priyanka Aribindi: So you wanted your platform to become even more of a cesspool for misinformation. Is that what I’m hearing? 

Juanita Tolliver: Sounds like that’s the goal. Yeah. 

Priyanka Aribindi: That wasn’t all that Zuckerberg said in his letter. He said that Meta was also wrong to have temporarily suppressed a 2020 New York Post story about a laptop belonging to then presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. In response, Zuckerberg wrote that Meta has since changed its policies and will no longer temporarily downgrade potentially false stories while it waits for fact checkers to weigh in. This is wild. It’s actually like all the things they should be doing that Mark Zuckerberg is coming out and saying, actually, we should never have done those things in the first place. It’s wild. He also said that he will stop donating money to help support local election infrastructure, a program Republicans derided by calling it Zuckerbucks. Just the cherry on top of all of this, really. 

Juanita Tolliver: Zuckerberg’s letter to Jordan is significant because Jordan is the head of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s been leading a major investigation into longstanding Republican accusations that social media companies censor conservative viewpoints. 

Priyanka Aribindi: So naturally, a lot of Republicans are thrilled about Zuckerberg’s letter. They see it as proof of their complaints. House Judiciary Committee Republicans said as much on X, and former President Donald Trump even posted on his social media site that, quote, “Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to suppress Hunter Biden laptop story.” I guess he is failing to recognize that at the time, he was actually the one in the White House. So make it make any amount of sense, please. 

Juanita Tolliver: For more on Zuckerberg’s letter and what it could mean for the spread of misinformation this election cycle, I spoke with Will Oremus. He covers tech for the Washington Post. I started by asking him how exactly Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Meta. 

Will Oremus: So there was a whole court case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, in which a couple of Republican state attorneys general, along with a host of other plaintiffs, mostly from the political right, alleged that the Biden administration, including the CDC, the FBI, numerous other branches of government had leaned on social media companies in a way that crossed a First Amendment line to crack down on whether it was election misinformation or misinformation about the origins of the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theories and then misinformation about the Covid 19 vaccine in 2021. This was a case that got litigated pretty thoroughly. The Supreme Court ended up declining to place limits on the White House’s contacts with the tech companies. So, the case isn’t technically over, but it didn’t go in favor of the Republican side. And so after that, Jordan’s committee has continued his inquiry, his investigation uh into the matter. And I can imagine that Zuckerberg is hoping this letter will kind of resolve Meta’s part in that. 

Juanita Tolliver: And reading between the lines, we got to go back to his language here. What’s the significance, then, of Zuckerberg using words like pressured and censored? 

Will Oremus: It was interesting that Zuckerberg used the word censor, because that is, you know, that’s exactly what they didn’t do, or at least the government wasn’t found to have done in this court case. But it is the language that continues to be used on the right for when social networks take down posts by users that violate their policies. So that was interesting. The other thing that was interesting, though, that I think is worth highlighting, is that even though Zuckerberg said the Biden administration did pressure Facebook, he said ultimately the decisions were ours. We made the calls about what content to take down, what content to leave up. He was annoyed that the Biden administration expressed frustration about some of those decisions. But even in this letter to Jordan, he said, ultimately, we own the decisions we made, and that’s actually consistent with the way the court case turned out, which was that the plaintiffs weren’t able to show that the government itself had directly censored the users of these social networks. 

Juanita Tolliver: So Zuckerberg also says in his letter that Meta will no longer temporarily demote stories in the US while it waits for fact checkers. Given that we’re about two months away from the election. How could that choice affect how misinformation and disinformation spreads across Meta’s platforms? 

Will Oremus: Yeah, that that absolutely can have an impact. This is getting a bit into the weeds of content moderation, but it was actually it was kind of a big deal five or six years ago, Facebook, when it started its Fact-checking program. So it partnered with all these independent fact checking organizations because Facebook said, look, we don’t want to be in the business of deciding what’s true and false. But at least for certain types of misinformation, we’ll work with these outside groups. And if they say it’s false, then we’ll put up a little flag that says this has been fact checked or debunked or that kind of thing. The problem was, if you know how information travels on social networks, by the time the fact checkers get around to saying something is false, it’s, you know, it takes a day or two to really run it down. By then, millions of people potentially have seen it. So what they started doing was, okay. If we’ve seen something flagged as potential misinfo, we’re worried they might be right. We send it out to our fact checkers, and in the meantime, we’re just going to slow down the way we amplify this across our networks to make sure that it doesn’t go completely viral until we get the fact check. And that’s what they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story, which we now know was was a mistake. I mean, Facebook and Twitter have admitted they shouldn’t have suppressed that story. It was based in fact. But that that sort of example of a failure on their part has been used by the right to say that this whole project was flawed and that it was all censorship. And so now they will no longer demote posts while they wait for the fact checker’s verdict. So in 2024, as the election approaches, that means when a potential falsehood starts going viral on Facebook, on Instagram, on WhatsApp, you’ll just have to wait for the fact checkers to reach their decision before the company will take any action. 

Juanita Tolliver: I mean, while hundreds of thousands of people absorb the incorrect information, and from the outside, it feels like eight years after social media companies pledged to do more to fight misinformation after the 2016 election, and they sort of tried to do it in 2020. The platforms are fully backing away from those stances, even as the pressure to fight misinformation grows. I mean, look at X,  the CEO Elon Musk is a regular source of misinformation. There’s also the rise of artificial intelligence. As someone who follows this, is that characterization accurate? 

Will Oremus: Yeah, it’s more accurate for some platforms than others. I mean, certainly X under Elon Musk is taking a radically different approach than Twitter did before Musk. With Meta, you know, with Facebook and Instagram, um with Google and YouTube, the changes, I think, are more incremental. It’s more of a vibe shift. I think that, you know, that they went to 2020 saying, hey, we’re going to do our best. We got our election war room. We’re going to do everything we can to fight misinformation. Now, we all know that, you know, those efforts were not uh, were not without their their flaws. I mean, you know, plenty of falsehoods still circulated. They ended up suppressing stuff that they probably shouldn’t have. But now they’ve pulled back and the rhetoric is much different. And so well look, we’re going to be really careful. We’re going to make sure we don’t accidentally censor people. So there’s a sort of an atmosphere of more permissiveness heading into this election. So yeah, I mean, if you thought misinformation was bad in 2020, prepare for it to potentially be worse in 2024. 

Juanita Tolliver: Tell me a little bit about why the mood changed so much in the past few years, though. Tell me a little bit about why they’re pulling back so fast, so quickly. 

Will Oremus: There has been a big backlash on the right, so if we go back to like the period from maybe 2018 to 2021, a lot of the outcry against these social networks was coming from people concerned about misinformation, about hate speech, about all the sort of bad stuff that their networks were tolerating, were potentially amplifying. So they were responsive to some degree to that criticism from the left in 2020, starting in 2021 or so, I would say the criticism from the right grew much louder. So after they suspended Donald Trump, for instance, from their platforms, that galvanized a lot of Trump supporters to say that Big Tech was part of this conspiracy to silence the right. And again, Covid played a big part as well. And like the companies expanded their fact-checking efforts dramatically to try to do what they saw or at least profess to see as their civic duty to tamp down on falsehoods about the pandemic. And then they got a ton of flack for that. And so for the past couple of years, this committee run by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, who chairs the powerful House Judiciary Committee, has been doing this ongoing investigation. Um. Critics, you know, see it as sort of a witch hunt. Um. His supporters see it as a sort of a righteous reckoning with this ugly history of censorship by the social networks. But he’s been applying a lot of pressure himself. And so I think an irony here is that Zuckerberg is saying, yeah, that Biden was really wrong to pressure me. But he’s saying that in response to a lot of pressure from– 

Juanita Tolliver: Right. 

Will Oremus: –Jordan and the Republicans. 

Juanita Tolliver: Now, you said prepare for more misinformation in 2024, but what’s your prediction for how misinformation will impact the election? And what should people do at the individual level when they’re confronted with things that they know are wrong on the internet? 

Will Oremus: It’s hard to solve sort of a systemic problem with our information environment just through individual actions. But certainly as a as a reader of news, I mean, I think people probably are more aware today than they were five years ago that you can’t believe everything you see on social media. At the same time, I think people more than ever are in their own. I don’t want to say echo chamber because that’s not quite right. They see the world filtered through their online social media algorithms. So I think the information environment is still broken. People should find sources that they trust based on a history of credibility, based on a history of a willingness to correct errors, you know, and to publish corrections, to admit when they’re wrong. You know, that’s a sign that an organization is committed to the truth. Um. And so, you know, follow those organizations or those people you found in the past to be honest brokers, you know, and look to them for information rather than just the stuff that bubbles to the top of your TikTok or your Instagram or whatever. 

Juanita Tolliver: That was my conversation with Will Oremus, he covers tech for the Washington Post. 

Priyanka Aribindi: That is the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in just a moment, but if you like our show, please make sure to subscribe and to share it with your friends. We’ll be right back after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Priyanka Aribindi: Let’s wrap up with some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz will do their first joint interview on CNN. According to a statement from the network, the two will sit down with Dana Bash for their first press hit since Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee. The interview will be taped, not live, and it will air on CNN Thursday. Harris has received a lot of criticism for steering away from the media since becoming the Democratic nominee. She has yet to do a press conference and has only taken questions from reporters a handful of times. So the stakes are high for her and Walz’s performance as they continue to rally support for their campaign with less than 70 days till the election. 

Juanita Tolliver: On Monday, a federal judge in Texas halted a new Biden administration program designed to give undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens a more direct path to citizenship. President Biden announced the Keeping Families Together program in June as a way to simplify the citizenship process for an estimated half a million undocumented people who are married to U.S. citizens. In order to be eligible, those applying need to have lived in the U.S. for at least ten years, and have been married since before June 17th of this year, undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens were already eligible for green card status, but prior to this program were often required to return to their home countries for years while waiting for their papers to be processed. The program is on pause for at least the next two weeks in response to a lawsuit from 16 Republican controlled states who alleged that the program cost them money by allowing undocumented spouses to remain in their states. Immigration advocacy groups say that there is no evidence behind the lawsuits claims. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that he will meet with President Biden next month to present his plan to end Russia’s invasion. Zelensky told reporters on Tuesday that he and Biden will talk through Ukraine’s plan to declare victory over Russia at next month’s United Nations General Assembly. The two countries continue to exchange fire. Russia has rattled Ukraine with a barrage of missile strikes over the past few days, amid Ukraine’s surprise offensive in the western Russian region of Kursk. According to Zelensky, that attack was the first part of his four phase plan to end the war. But he emphasized that he needs U.S. support to carry out the remaining three stages. Zelensky will also reportedly present his plan to both Vice President Harris and former President Trump ahead of the election. I can only imagine how the latter conversation will go. 

Juanita Tolliver: The U.S. Supreme Court might be trying its best to shield former President Donald Trump from prosecution, but special counsel Jack Smith hasn’t given up yet. On Tuesday, Smith filed a new indictment against Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. According to Smith’s office, the charges in this new indictment come from a grand jury that had not heard evidence in this case before. The charges in the new case are the same as the ones that Smith filed about a year ago against Trump. But the language in the indictment has been changed to account for the July Supreme Court decision that granted Donald Trump and all future presidents absolute immunity for actions conducted as part of their constitutional duties. And while it might seem obvious, the new indictment goes out of its way to make it clear that Trump was not acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to stop states from certifying Joe Biden’s election win. There’s pretty much no chance this case goes to trial before the November election. But Trump was still rattled enough by the new indictment to throw a very on brand tantrum about it on Truth Social. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. Among the several truths, as you call them, he uh, said that this is just all caps, persecution of a political opponent. 

Juanita Tolliver: Oh my goodness. 

Priyanka Aribindi: That this is for third world countries and banana republics, not for the USA. I for one, miss the time where banana republic simply referred to the store. 

Juanita Tolliver: Yikes. 

Priyanka Aribindi: And those are the headlines. 

[AD BREAK]

Priyanka Aribindi: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review, send all of your positive thoughts to Jack Smith and tell your friends to listen. 

Juanita Tolliver: And if you’re into reading and not just Trump’s insane ramblings on Truth Social like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Juanita Tolliver. 

Priyanka Aribindi: I’m Priyanka Aribindi.

[spoken together] And even zero gravity can’t stop democracy. 

Juanita Tolliver: Okay, this is the ultimate voter plan. Like that’s something organizers ask you, do you have your voting plan? And now these astronauts who are stranded in space have a voting plan. It’s easy y’all. 

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s so much easier for you than it is for them. So just–

Juanita Tolliver: Right. 

Priyanka Aribindi: –channel that energy. [laughter] [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.