Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in podcast posted on Friday that the Biden administration pressured him to remove content about Covid vaccine side effects.
At the beginning of the conversation, which lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that overall he was “pretty supportive of the vaccine rollout” and that they were “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that in trying to push this agenda, they've also tried to censor anyone who basically opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.
A representative of the Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta said this would happen stop relying outsources fact-checking to third parties posted on widely used apps and instead turns to community notes, allowing users to add comments about veracity. This strategy puts Meta on a par with X, whose owner, Elon Muskadvises the president-elect Donald Trump and was a major supporter of his campaign.
It is also the latest in a string of announcements and comments since Trump's election that appear aimed at reassuring the incoming president. Last week Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company's current vice president of policy and a former Republican Party staffer.
The finish line was one of several large technology companies announce that she donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration, NBC News reported.
During Friday's press conference, President Biden addressed Meta's change in fact-checking policy.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and then say that from that point on we won't verify anything anymore, and you know, when millions of people will go online and read this stuff, that's true – anyway, I think it's a real shame.” ”Biden said.
In the past, Zuckerberg has expressed criticism of the Biden administration's handling of Covid-19 content.
In letter in August before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to Covid-19, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made in the wake of those demands.
“And they pressured us very hard to take down everything that was true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pressured us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines can cause side effects basically needs to be removed.”
Zuckerberg did not specify who in the White House made the requests, saying: “I was not directly involved in those conversations.” However, he said the company responded that it did not intend to remove content that “is in some sense undeniably true.”
Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever were the most common side effects of the drug Johnson&Johnson's one-shot Covid vaccine. There are Covid vaccines all over the world assigned saving tens of millions of lives a year as the pandemic raged.
In a separate case, Zuckerberg said the U.S. government had not done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said the European Union has imposed more than $30 billion in fines on tech companies over the past 20 years.
“One of the things I'm optimistic about with President Trump is that I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
TO WATCH: Reed: Is Facebook an information platform or an information carrier?
