‘They pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true,’ the Meta CEO says.
Meta and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a new interview this week that Biden administration staff pressured his company into censoring COVID-19 posts and memes.
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and … scream at them and curse,” the Facebook founder said during a Friday appearance of the “Joe Rogan Experience.”
Zuckerberg said that White House officials became the “most extreme” about targeting certain posts “when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program” in 2021.
“While they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
“They basically pushed us and said, ‘anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’”
Recalling what he told White House officials, Zuckerberg said, “I was just like, ‘well, we’re just not going to do that.’”
The two most popular COVID-19 vaccines, produced by Pfizer and Moderna, are now mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to include warnings about possible side effects such as myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation—namely in younger males.
“I’m generally pretty pro-vaccine. I think on the balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative,” he told Rogan.
Zuckerberg said that at first, he was “sympathetic” to removing certain posts on Facebook “at the beginning of COVID.” The situation soon changed.
“When it went from ‘two weeks to flatten the curve,’ in the beginning it was, ‘There weren’t enough masks,’ ‘masks aren’t that important,’ to then it’s ‘Oh, now you have to wear a mask.’ Everything was shifting around. It just became really difficult to … follow,” he said.
“They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo Dicaprio looking at a TV talking about in how, ten years from now or something, you’re gonna see an ad that says if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible … for payment—a sort of class action lawsuit-type meme.”
