Faced with right-wing criticism that taking down false posts somehow “censored Americans,” Facebook-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw in the towel and said that his social media companies will be more hands-off with misleading posts.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fancies himself as some sort of mixed martial arts cage fighter, but he routinely gets beaten around pretty easily when conservatives pick fights with him over what they can and cannot post on his platforms.

His latest white flag of surrender seems to have come out of the blue, though it is a communication with the House Judiciary Committee, which grilled him and other tech executives seven months ago over dangers to children on their platforms.

This seems to have nothing to do with that, but CBS News reports that Zuckerberg sent a letter to that committee’s chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) saying that his companies shouldn’t have censored false Facebook posts about COVID, and blamed the Biden administration for pressuring them to do so.  

This all echoes what Zuckerberg was up to during the days of the Trump administration, if you'll recall. In an effort not to draw unwanted Republican scrutiny to his company, Zuckerberg went and met with Trump at the White House in 2019, even joining in on a private dinner with Peter Thiel and Trump, three years after he tried to fend off criticism from the left that Facebook was partly to blame for getting Trump elected. At that point, Zuckerberg was distancing himself from cries of censorship, and suggesting that Facebook would accept political ads from all sides, even if they contained falsehoods, "because that's democracy."

And by June 2020, Zuckerberg was facing a (virtual) walkout by Facebook employees over his wishy-washy handling of Trump's inflammatory posts about the election, and his lies about COVID.

The House Judiciary Committee this week posted Zuckerberg’s latest letter on (ahem) their Facebook page, declaring that Zuck’s capitulation was another “Big win for free speech.”

“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 humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to the committee. While it was ultimately Meta’s decision whether they would comply, Zuck now whines that “I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

Both sides of this discourse fail to take into account that thousands of Americans were dying daily, and that may have been more important than your crazy uncle's right to post about ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or whatever other crazy shit he heard on Joe Rogan’s show.

Indeed, the White House said in a Monday statement to Politico that “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

Zuckerberg’s letter also caves on the whole Hunter Biden laptop controversy, after Facebook limited the spread of the initial New York Post story reporting it. Though it was the FBI who’d flagged the story as a possible disinformation campaign, and honestly, the fact that the laptop contained troves of nude photos forced many news organizations to back off the story.

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg’s letter said.

And finally, the GOP appears to have scared Zuck off from making any election-related contributions, like the $400 million he once donated to support electoral infrastructure in the 2020 election.

“I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” his letter said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

Sounds like the mixed martial arts cage fighter just got body-slammed and thrown into another chokehold.

Related: Zuckerberg Denies Secret Deal With Jared Kushner to Never Censor Trump’s Posts [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 31: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony from the heads of the largest tech firms on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)