Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast published Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content on side effects of Covid vaccines.
Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he’s generally “pretty pro rolling out vaccines” and that they are “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said.
A Biden administration representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta said it would stop relying on third parties to check facts published on its widely used applications and instead turn to community notes, letting users add commentary regarding truthfulness. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been advising President-elect Donald Trump and was a major backer of his campaign.
It’s also the latest in a string of announcements and comments following Trump’s election that appear targeted at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current policy vice president and a former Republican Party staffer.
Meta was one of several large technology companies to announce that it was contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News reported.
President Biden addressed Meta’s policy change on checking facts during a Friday press conference.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything, and, you know, when you have millions of people going online, reading this stuff, it is — anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Zuckerberg has expressed criticism in the past 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 “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made following those requests.
“And they pushed us super hard, to take down the things that were honestly were true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”
Zuckerberg didn’t specify who from the White House made the requests, saying, “I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly.” But he said the company’s response was that it wasn’t going to take down content that “is kind of inarguably true.”
The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea and fever were the most common side effects of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid vaccine. Worldwide, Covid vaccines are credited with saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic was raging.
On a separate matter, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said the European Union has fined technology companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.
“It’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump, is I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
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