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Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of social media company Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden White House to censor certain content surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In 2021, senior officials in 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 significant frustration with our teams when we couldn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said.

In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said the pressure he felt in 2021 was “misguided” and that he “regretted” his company, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, not being more vocal. Zuckerberg added that with the “benefit of hindsight and new information,” decisions were made in 2021 that would not be made today.

“As I told our teams at the time, I believe deeply that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any administration in any direction — and we are prepared to fight back if that happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote.

President Biden said in July 2021 that social media platforms were “killing people” with misinformation about the pandemic.

Although Biden later walked back those comments, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said at the time that disinformation posted on social media posed a “serious threat to public health.”

A White House spokesperson responded to Zuckerberg’s letter, saying the administration at the time encouraged “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our position is clear and consistent: We believe technology companies and other private actors must consider the effects their actions have on the American people while making independent choices about the information they present,” the spokesperson said.

Zuckerberg also wrote in the letter that the FBI had warned his company about possible Russian disinformation surrounding Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian company Burisma that could influence the 2020 election.

That fall, Zuckerberg said, his team temporarily reduced the New York Post’s coverage of alleged corruption within the Biden family while their fact-checkers reviewed the story.

Zuckerberg said it has since been “made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have underreported the story.”

Meta has since adjusted its policies and processes to “ensure this doesn’t happen again” and will no longer demote content in the US pending fact-checking.

In the letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he will not repeat the actions he took in 2020, when he helped shore up “electoral infrastructure.”

“The idea here was to make sure that local election authorities across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a pandemic,” Meta’s CEO said.

Zuckerberg said the initiatives were intended to be nonpartisan, but he said “some people believed this work benefited one party more than the other.” Zuckerberg said his goal is to be “neutral” and so he “will not be making a similar contribution this cycle.”

The GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee shared the letter on X, saying Zuckerberg “just admitted that the Biden Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, that Facebook censored Americans, and that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

The Meta chief has long faced scrutiny from Republicans in Congress, who accuse Facebook and other major tech platforms of being biased against conservatives. While Zuckerberg insists that Meta enforces its rules impartially, the story has gained traction in conservative circles. Republican lawmakers have specifically scrutinized Facebook’s decision to restrict the distribution of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

In testimony before Congress in recent years, Zuckerberg has attempted to bridge the gap between his social media giant and policymakers, but it has had little effect.

In a 2020 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged that many Facebook employees are left-leaning. But he said the company takes care not to let political bias seep into decisions.

Additionally, he said that Facebook’s content moderators, many of whom are contractors, are located around the world and “their geographic diversity is more representative of the community we serve than just the full-time employee base in our Bay Area headquarters.”

In June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing the federal government of censoring conservative speech on social media had no standing to sue, a win for the White House.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “To establish their standing, plaintiffs must show that there is a substantial risk that they will suffer an injury in the near future that can be traced to a government defendant.” Coney Barrett continued, “because no plaintiff has borne that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

According to the News Literacy Project, an independent educational organization, there have been more than 500 instances of misinformation, including false celebrity endorsements, during the 2024 election campaign.

–CNN’s Arlette Saenz contributed to this report