Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast posted Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about Covid vaccine side effects.
At the start of a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “pretty supportive of the vaccine rollout” and that they were “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while trying to promote this agenda, they have also tried to censor anyone who opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.
A representative for the Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta announced it would stop relying on third parties to verify facts posted about its widely used apps and would instead turn to community notes, allowing users to add comments on truthfulness. The strategy brings Meta closer to X, whose owner, Elon Musk, advised President-elect Donald Trump and was a key supporter of his campaign.
It is also the latest in a series of announcements and comments following Trump’s election that appear intended to appease the new president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current vice president of politics and a former member of the Republican Party.
Meta was one of several major tech companies to announce it would contribute $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. NBC News reported.
President Biden addressed Meta’s policy change regarding fact-checking during a press conference Friday.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, in passing, that from this point on we’re not going to check the facts anymore, and, you know, when millions of people go online and read this stuff, it’s — anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Zuckerberg has expressed criticism in the past regarding the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content.
In an August letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions made by the company following these requests.
“And they pushed us very hard to remove things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you need to remove it.”
Zuckerberg did not specify who in the White House made these requests, saying, “I was not directly involved in these conversations.” But he said the company’s response was that it was not going to remove content that “is indisputably true.”
The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea and fever were the most common side effects of Johnson & Johnson single-shot Covid vaccine. Worldwide, Covid vaccines are credited saving tens of millions of lives each year when the pandemic raged.
On another topic, Zuckerberg said the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to protect its tech industry, leaving too much power in the hands of foreign regulators. He said the European Union has fined tech companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.
“That’s one of the things I’m optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
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