Pound hits two-year high against US dollar; White House ‘pressured’ Facebook on Covid-19 content – as it happened

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Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said the US government under Joe Biden put pressure on the Facebook social network to censor certain Covid-19 content" during the coronavirus pandemic.

Zuckerberg said that senior officials" from the White House repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire", in a letter to the US House of Representatives' judiciary committee. He wrote:

I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today.