Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said he regrets bowing to what he said was pressure from the US government to censor Covid-related posts on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in the Joe Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the 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 failed to agree,” he wrote in a letter to Jim Jordan, the head of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. “I believe the administration’s pressure was misguided.”

During the pandemic, Facebook sent warnings to users about misinformation when they commented on or liked posts because these posts contained false information about Covid.

The company also removed posts criticizing its Covid vaccines and suggesting the virus was developed in a Chinese lab.

During the 2020 US presidential election campaign, Biden accused social media platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by posting disinformation about coronavirus vaccines on their platforms.

“I think we made choices that, given what we know now and the new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg said. “I regret not being more open about it.

“As I said to our teams at the time, I believe we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any government. And we are prepared to push back if something like that happens again.”

Zuckerberg also said Facebook “temporarily downgraded” a story about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after an FBI warning that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.

Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation and that “in hindsight we should not have considered the story less important.”

The House Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, called Zuckerberg’s admissions a “major victory for free speech” in a post on the committee’s Facebook page.

The White House defended its actions during the pandemic, saying it encouraged “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.”

“Our position has been clear and consistent,” the report said. “We believe that technology companies and other private actors must consider the effects their actions have on the American people as they make independent choices about the information they present.”