Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
dead CEO Mark Zuckerberg He told Joe Rogan on A Podcast He posted on Friday that his company was under pressure from the Biden administration to remove content related to side effects of Covid vaccines.
Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “very supportive of the vaccine rollout” and that it was “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they're trying to push this program, they've also tried to censor basically anyone who opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.
A Biden administration representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These statements come days after Meta said she would do so Stop relying It requires third parties to verify facts posted on its widely used apps and instead resort to community feedback, allowing users to add comments regarding honesty. The strategy makes Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon MuskHe was advising the president-elect Donald Trump He was a major supporter of his campaign.
It's also the latest in a series of ads and comments following Trump's election that appear aimed at appeasing the incoming president. last week, dead It replaced its head 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 Many major technology companies To announce that it contributed one million dollars to Trump's inauguration, NBC News I mentioned.
President Biden addressed Meta's policy change on fact-checking during a news conference on Friday.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, 'By the way, from now on, we're not going to fact-check anything,' and, you know, when you have millions of people going online, reading these things, it's — anyway,” Biden said. “I think it's really shameful.”
Zuckerberg has in the past expressed criticism about the Biden administration's handling of Covid-related content.
In a letter The administration “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, Zuckerberg told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made after those requests.
“They pushed us very hard to remove things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you should basically delete it.”
Zuckerberg did not specify who made the requests from the White House, saying: “I did not participate in those conversations directly.” But he said the company's response was that it would not remove content “deemed to be indisputably true.”
Food and Drug Administration He said in 2021 Headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea, and fever were the most common side effects Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine is one dose. Covid vaccines exist all over the world Credit With tens of millions of lives saved annually while the epidemic was raging.
In a separate matter, Zuckerberg said the US government had not done enough to protect its tech industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said that the European Union has imposed fines on technology companies of more than $30 billion over the past twenty years.
“One of the things I'm optimistic about with President Trump is that I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
He watches: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or a way to get information?
