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 Joe Rogan said in a podcast revealed on Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about the effects of Covid vaccines.
Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he is generally “good for getting vaccines out” and that they are “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they've tried to push that program, they've also tried to censor anybody who basically argues against it,” he said. Zuckerberg.
A Biden administration representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments come days after Meta said he would stop trusting have third parties check published facts about the widely used claims and instead turn to community notes, allowing users to submit a statement regarding truth. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Muskhas been advising the President-elect Donald Trump and was a major supporter of his campaign.
It's also the latest in a series of posts and comments since Trump's election that seem aimed at attacking the incoming president. Last week, Meta Joel Kaplan, the company's vice president of current policy and a former Republican Party staffer, replaced the president of global affairs, Nick Clegg.
Meta was one of several large technology companies to announce that he was contributing $1 million to Trump's foundation, NBC News reported.
President Biden addressed Meta's policy change on fact-checking at a press conference on Friday.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from now on, we're not going to investigate anything, and, you know, when you have millions of people who ' going online, reading this stuff, it's — at least, I think it's really embarrassing,” Biden said.
Zuckerberg has previously expressed criticism of the Biden administration's handling of Covid-related content.
In a a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration was “pressuring” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of its decisions the company did after these requests.
“And they pushed us really hard, to take down the things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that to say that vaccines can have side effects, you have to take it down to the core.”
Zuckerberg did not specify who from the White House made the requests, saying, “I was not directly involved in those discussions.” But he said the company's response was that they were not going to take down content that is “mostly true.”
The Food and Drug Administration he said in 2021 that the most common side effects were headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea and fever Johnson & Johnson one-shot Covid vaccine. Worldwide, there are Covid vaccines credit by saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic was increasing.
On another issue, Zuckerberg said the US government has not done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving 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.
“This is one of the things I'm optimistic about with President Trump, is I think he just wants to win America,” said Zuckerberg.
Watch: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or an information vehicle?
