House Republicans put contempt vote targeting Zuckerberg on hold

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) put the panel’s scheduled vote on whether to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress on hold Thursday after he said the social media company provided additional documents to the committee. 

“Based on Facebook’s newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee’s investigation, the Committee has decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now. To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL,” Jordan posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. 

The committee had scheduled a vote for Thursday afternoon over holding the CEO of the Facebook and Instagram parent company in contempt after alleging the company failed to cooperate with the panel’s investigation into how tech companies communicate with the federal government and make content moderation decisions. 

Meta had strongly pushed back on the allegations that it failed to comply. A spokesperson earlier this week, when the committee scheduled the vote, said in a statement Meta has supplied more than 53,000 documents to the committee. 

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed to The Hill Thursday the company sent additional documents to the committee. 

In addition to announcing the vote would be held, Jordan shared parts of the internal documents the panel received and ramped up his allegations that Meta is censoring content with an anti-conservative bias and being coerced to do so by the Biden administration. 

Democrats have slammed Republicans over their attacks on social media companies’ content moderation practices, a topic that’s been the focus of a series of hearings under Jordan, and pointed out that the private companies are protected by the First Amendment to moderate content however they see fit under their own policies. 

Jordan, however, continued his attack and wrote that the documents received “PROVE” that the social media companies “censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.” 

Stone declined to comment on the additional allegations laid out by Jordan. 

The snippets of documents included show internal Meta discussions that largely focused on moderating content about COVID-19 and vaccines. 

The pressure from the Biden administration that Jordan said is indicated in the messages, though, was also shared publicly. 

In July 2021, President Biden said social media companies that allow coronavirus misinformation are “killing people.” He later walked back that criticism, saying “Facebook isn’t killing people,” and instead targeted the people who spread the misinformation online rather than the platform itself.