Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears on 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 unwanted 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’re “more positive than negative.”
“But I believe that while they’re attempting to push that program, in addition they tried to censor anyone who is largely arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said.
A Biden administration representative didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta said it could stop counting on third parties to ascertain facts published on its widely used applications and as a substitute turn to community notes, letting users add commentary regarding truthfulness. The strategy puts Meta more consistent with X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been advising President-elect Donald Trump and was a serious backer of his campaign.
It is also the most recent 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 worldwide affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the corporate’s current policy vice chairman and a former Republican Party staffer.
Meta was one in all several large technology corporations 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 concept a billionaire should purchase something and say, by the best way, from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything, and, you recognize, when you might have hundreds of thousands of individuals going surfing, reading these things, it’s — anyway, I believe it’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Zuckerberg has expressed criticism prior to now concerning 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 among the decisions the corporate made following those requests.
“They usually pushed us super hard, to take down the things that were truthfully were true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They principally pushed us and said, you recognize, anything that claims that vaccines may need unwanted effects, you principally have 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 corporate’s response was that it wasn’t going to take down content that “is type of inarguably true.”
The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea and fever were essentially the most common unwanted effects of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid vaccine. Worldwide, Covid vaccines are credited with saving tens of hundreds of thousands of lives a yr when the pandemic was raging.
On a separate matter, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to guard its technology industry, leaving an excessive amount of power within the hands of regulators abroad. He said the European Union has fined technology corporations greater than $30 billion over the past 20 years.
“It’s one in all the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump, is I believe he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
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