Unlike some of his tech founder peers, Mark Zuckerberg says he’s not interested in getting involved with politics in 2024.
In a letter sent Monday to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO said his goal was to remain “neutral.”
“My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Zuckerberg said that, unlike the last presidential election, he does not plan to donate to support election infrastructure in 2024. In 2020, he and his wife donated $400 million to nonpartisan organizations helping run elections during the pandemic. Republicans branded them “Zuckerbucks” and claimed that they benefited Democrats in the election.
“They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” he wrote.
Though the donations have long been controversial, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May found private donations, like Zuckerberg’s, did not advantage Democrats.
In the letter, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta’s content moderation, an issue Jordan and other Republicans have been highly critical of, accusing the social media platform of censoring conservative viewpoints.
Zuckerberg said in 2021 the Biden administration repeatedly pressured Meta to remove content related to COVID-19 and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company did not agree.
Internal Meta emails obtained by the Journal last year previously showed the company had removed content related to COVID-19 after pressure from the White House.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote, adding, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In 2023, Jordan threatened to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress for not providing documents related to censorship of conservative viewpoints.
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that in 2020, Meta suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while waiting for fact-checking to investigate, adding, “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
He said the company changed its processes to prevent this from happening again, such as no longer demoting stories while waiting for a fact-check.
Zuckerberg has previously said Meta was wrong to suppress the laptop story.
Meta declined to comment when reached by BI.
