‘These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them,’ Zuckerberg says
Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor dissent about the COVID-19 vaccine, including humor and satire, the tech CEO said Friday on the Joe Rogan Experience. He also said he was “optimistic” about Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.
“They pushed us super hard to take down the things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg said. “Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects you basically need to take down.”
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse,” he continued. “It got to this point where we were like ‘No, we’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’”
Zuckerberg has previously described how the Biden administration leaned on Meta. In August, he told the House Judiciary Committee that White House officials in 2021 “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
During his Friday appearance, Zuckerberg said Meta resisted Biden administration officials’ pressure to remove a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio joking that anyone who took the COVID-19 vaccine would be eligible for a class action lawsuit in a few years.
“Then, all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. It was brutal. It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg’s Joe Rogan Experience appearance follows his Tuesday announcement that Meta was doing away with fact-checkers. He released a video describing them as “too politically biased.” Zuckerberg also said Meta would rely on community notes similar to those on X.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg said he’s “optimistic” about the incoming Trump presidency.
“One of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
“I do think that the American technology industry is a bright spot in the American economy,” he added. “I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world and I think it should be part of the U.S.’s strategy going forward to defend that.”