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 released Friday that his company had been pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about the side effects of the Covid vaccine.
Early in the conversation, which lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “pretty pro at rolling out vaccines” and “more positive than negative.”
“But I think they were pushing that program while also basically trying to censor anyone who opposed it,” Zuckerberg said.
A Biden administration spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments come just days after Meta said it would stop relying on third parties to verify posts on its widely used application and would instead use community notes to allow users to add comments about their veracity. It will. The strategy brings Meta more in line with X, whose owner Elon Musk has advised President-elect Donald Trump and has been a major supporter of his campaign.
It is also the latest in a series of announcements and comments since Trump’s election that appear to be aimed at placating the president-elect. Last week, Meta replaced Nick Clegg, its president of global operations, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current vice president of policy and a former Republican staffer.
NBC News reported that Mehta was one of several large tech companies that announced they had donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
President Biden addressed Mehta’s policy changes on fact-checking during a press conference Friday.
“The idea that billionaires can buy things and say things, and from now on we’re not going to fact-check anything, if millions of people go online and read this — I think that’s a really shameful thing anyway.” Go Biden said.
Zuckerberg has previously expressed criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of coronavirus-related content.
In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Mehta to “censor” COVID-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made in response to those requests.
“And they pushed us very hard to knock down things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They were basically putting pressure on us and saying that we should basically stop doing anything that said there might be side effects to the vaccine.”
“I was not directly involved in that conversation,” Zuckerberg said, declining to specify who at the White House made the request. But he said the company’s response was that it would not remove content that was “an indisputable fact.”
The Food and Drug Administration says headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever are the most common side effects in 2021. Johnson & Johnson Single-shot Covid vaccine. Globally, COVID-19 vaccines are credited with saving tens of millions of lives annually when the pandemic was raging.
Separately, Zuckerberg said the U.S. government is not doing enough to protect the tech industry, putting too much power in the hands of foreign regulators. He said the European Union has fined technology companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.
“One of the things I’m optimistic about about President Trump is that he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
see: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or a means of disseminating information?
