Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an interview with Joe Rogan that Biden administration staff called the company to demand they censor content pertaining to COVID-19.
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said.
He went on to describe a meme that the company was forced to remove. “We just said, ‘No. We’re not. We’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are, that are true.”
The Biden administration tried to “censor anyone who was basically arguing against” taking the COVID-19 vaccine, Zuckerberg added. “And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were, honestly, were true. I mean, they basically pushed us and said, ‘Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’ And I was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that. Like we’re clearly not going to do that.’”
Last year, Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) that “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, 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.”
Despite acknowledging that the platform faced “pressure” from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said that it was “ultimately” the platform’s decision to “take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.”
Zuckerberg added he “regret[s] that we were not more outspoken about it.”
