Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
dead CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast published Friday that his company was under pressure from the Biden administration to remove content related to side effects of Covid vaccines.
Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “very supportive of the vaccine rollout” and that it was “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they're trying to push this program, they've also tried to censor basically anyone who opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.
A Biden administration representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These statements come days after Meta announced that it will stop relying on third parties to verify facts published on its widely used applications, and instead will resort to community feedback, allowing users to add comments regarding honesty. This strategy brings Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been advising President-elect Donald Trump and was a major supporter of his campaign.
It's also the latest in a series of ads and comments following Trump's election that appear aimed at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Meta replaced its head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company's current vice president of policy and a former Republican Party staffer.
NBC News reported that Meta was one of several major technology companies that announced they had contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration.
President Biden addressed Meta's policy change on fact-checking during a news conference on Friday.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, 'By the way, from now on, we're not going to fact-check anything,' and, you know, when you have millions of people going online, reading these things, it's — anyway,” Biden said. “I think it's really shameful.”
Zuckerberg has in the past expressed his criticism about the Biden administration's handling of Covid-related content.
In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” COVID-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made following those requests.
“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 should basically delete it.”
Zuckerberg did not specify who submitted the requests from the White House, saying: “I did not participate in those conversations directly.” But he said the company's response was that it would not remove content “deemed to be indisputably true.”
The FDA said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever were the most common side effects of Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine is one dose. Around the world, Covid vaccines are credited with saving tens of millions of lives annually while the pandemic was raging.
In a separate matter, Zuckerberg said the US government had not done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said that the European Union has imposed fines on technology companies of more than $30 billion over the past twenty years.
“One of the things I'm optimistic about with President Trump is that I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
Watch: Reid: Is Facebook a news platform or a means of obtaining information?
