Very briefly:

• Zuckerberg says the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook in 2021 to censor posts about the Covid pandemic — pressure that Zuckerberg now believes was misguided. Zuckerberg says, however, that the Biden White House was not ultimately responsible for Facebook’s actions because “we own our decisions.” But he now regrets some of those decisions.
• Zuckerberg says Facebook “temporarily demoted” a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. And in hindsight, it didn’t need to.
• Zuckerberg says his charity Chan Zuckerberg, unlike the 2020 election, will not spend money on helping people register to vote. He wrote that he thought it was the decent thing to do four years ago, “to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.”

In conservative online circles, including Jordan himself, Zuckerberg’s letter/mea culpa is being seen as a major deal: a “huge victory for free speech,” as Jordan’s judicial committee tweeted.

But if you look more closely at what Zuckerberg said, and didn’t say, you might come to the conclusion I’ve reached: that Zuckerberg very carefully gave Jordan just enough to claim a political victory — but without getting Meta into further trouble as it defends itself against a federal anti-monopoly lawsuit.

Let’s dig in. The first point in the letter, about the pressure the Biden White House is putting on Facebook during the pandemic, is by far the most significant politically.

For years, conservatives like Jordan have argued that Big Tech companies like Facebook have an anti-Republican bias. And here, finally, is a Big Tech CEO saying that a Democratic administration did indeed try to influence what happened on the platform. And that Zuckerberg now regrets some of the calls his team made about Covid content during the election.

People who pay attention to Silicon Valley and the internal battles over moderation on platforms like Facebook know that Zuckerberg’s comments are pretty mild. It’s well known that various government agencies, including the Trump White House, have been talking to all the platforms about Covid messaging and other things. And that there’s been an industry-wide pendulum swing against some of the platform moderation efforts that have been building up over the years.

Still, there’s something to be said for having the man who runs one of the largest platforms say this out loud and in public to lawmakers.

Will that sway an undecided voter a few months before the 2024 election? I don’t think so. But Republicans will try to make that happen.

The letter clearly becomes less important after that. Zuckerberg’s pledge not to put money into voter registration drives doesn’t seem as important now that the pandemic is over. And while he acknowledges that those donations have been politicized by “some people” — including Jordan and other Republicans — he says he only regrets that they were politicized.

But the most telling part of Zuckerberg’s letter is the story about the laptop.

If you’re a normal person, the “Hunter Biden laptop story” probably doesn’t mean much to you. If you spend any time with a certain kind of conservative, it means a lot: It’s a laptop containing a bunch of embarrassing emails and documents created by Joe Biden’s son, which was initially widely dismissed as a 2020 election hoax (for context: The Wall Street Journal, which first tried to break the story, was eventually cleared; when the Post ran the story, it removed the name of one of the piece’s authors).

Concerns that the laptop story was some kind of hack or disinformation campaign prompted Twitter (bear with me) to ban users from sharing links to the New York Post’s coverage of the story in October 2020. The company later apologized for the dramatic overstep.

But now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook has admitted that it has also made it harder for its users to get to that story. Aha!

Except you don’t need a congressional committee to figure that out. Because Facebook told the world it was doing it, while it was doing it.

This is Facebook representative Andy Stone, on October 14, 2020.

What if you were busy with the pandemic, the elections and everything around it and missed it?

No problem. Facebook executives have talked about this a few times. Like in 2022, when Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on one of the world’s most popular podcasts why it “sucks” that he got the laptop story wrong. “If we take down something we shouldn’t, that’s the worst.”

As far as well-intentioned-but-definitely-wrong platform decisions go, the New York Post’s coverage of the laptop story wasn’t great. But it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as Twitter’s call-out, which is why you don’t hear many people obsessing over it these days.

But “not many people know something” is not the same as “Mark Zuckerberg admitting something.” The first statement is true. The second is not, but it is much more exciting.

And that seems to be the point of the whole operation: Zuckerberg tried to give Jim Jordan and his party a victory, while giving them very little himself.