Meta CEO founder Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that members of President Biden’s administration yelled at his employees, demanding they take down content on their behalf.
Meta announced Tuesday that it would be ending its controversial fact-checking practices and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have “gone too far.” Zuckerberg spoke about the platform’s struggles to maintain freedom of expression while fending off pressure from the Biden administration amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program,” the social media CEO said, “while they were trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true. They basically pushed us and said, you know, that ‘anything saying that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’ And I was just like ‘We’re not going to do that, we’re clearly not going to do that, I mean that is kind of inarguably true.”
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“Who is ‘they’?” Rogan asked. “Who was telling you to take down things that talk about vaccine side effects?”
“It was people in the Biden administration,” the Meta CEO said.
He then spoke further about the “government censorship,” much of which he says has been covered by the congressional investigation, where he said, “I mean basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse, and it’s like… these documents are, it’s all kind of out there.”
Zuckerberg summarized that the conflict between his company and the government “basically got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not going to, we’re not going to take down things that are true.’ That’s ridiculous.”
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Zuckerberg recalled initially pushing back against the Biden administration on things that are factually true or memes, but later recalled how the game changed when Biden “gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference, or to some journalist, where he basically was like, ‘These guys are killing people.'”
‘Then, like, all these different agencies and branches of government basically just, like, started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal, it was brutal,” he said.
Rogan later asked about the response after the investigation, “was anybody held accountable? Was there any, I mean any repercussions?”
“I mean they lost the election,” Zuckerberg joked.
