Mark Zuckerberg says Biden pressured Meta to remove vaccine posts

Goal executive director Mark Zuckerberg he told Joe Rogan in a podcast posted on Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about the side effects of Covid vaccines.

At the beginning of a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he is generally “pretty supportive of the vaccine rollout” and that they are “more positive than negative.”

“But I think while they were trying to push that program, they were also trying to censor anyone who basically argued against it,” Zuckerberg said.

A Biden administration representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments come days after Meta said that stop trusting asks third parties to verify data posted in its widely used apps and instead turn to community notes, allowing users to add comments about veracity. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Muskhas been advising the president-elect donald trump and was one of the main sponsors of his campaign.

It is also the latest in a series of post-Trump election ads and comments that appear aimed at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Goal He replaced his president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current vice president of policy and a former Republican Party staffer.

Meta was one of several large technology companies to announce that he would contribute $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News reported.

President Biden addressed Meta’s policy change on fact-checking during a press conference on Friday.

“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from this moment on, we’re not going to verify anything, and, you know, when there are millions of people online, reading this stuff, it’s; everyone’s Anyway, I think it’s really embarrassing,” Biden said.

Zuckerberg has expressed criticism in the past about the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content.

in a letter In August, before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said the administration “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made. company after those requests.

“And they pushed us very hard to tear down things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically put pressure on us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines could have side effects, you basically have to remove it.”

Zuckerberg did not specify who in the White House made the requests, saying, “I was not directly involved in those conversations.” But he said the company’s response was that it would not remove content that “is indisputably 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 injection Covid vaccine. Around the world, Covid vaccines are accredited saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic was in full swing.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg said the US government has not done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving too much power in the hands of foreign regulators. He said the European Union has fined technology companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.

“It’s one of the things I’m optimistic about with President Trump: I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.

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