BY: Walker
Published 6 hours ago
On an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” released Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg painted a picture of Biden administration officials berating Facebook staff during requests to remove certain content from the social media platform.
The Facebook founder said the Biden administration became “the most extreme” about censoring certain posts “when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program.”
“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.
Zuckerberg said the administration “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, ‘We’re not gonna do that. We’re clearly not gonna do that.’”
The Meta CEO recently announced that Facebook would be doing away with fact checkers on the platform, because “too much harmless content gets censored” and that “a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”
Zuckerberg told Rogan that specific events from the “last 10 years”—Trump’s first election victory, Brexit, and COVID—led to “massive institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds.”
He said he was “sympathetic” to keeping false information off of Facebook “at the beginning of COVID,” but things 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, no you have to wear a mask.’ Everything was shifting around. It just became really difficult to kind of follow,” he said.
As skeptical users made viral jokes about the vaccines, Zuckerberg said, the Biden administration drew the line in the sand even harder.
“They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how, 10 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,” he said. “And [Biden officials said] ‘No, you have to take that down.’ We said, ‘No, we’re not gonna take down humor and satire. We’re not gonna take down things that are true.’”
The Meta CEO said that he’d incurred the administration’s full wrath after that. “Biden gave some statement at some point,” Zuckerberg continued, “where he’s just like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know—then all these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”
Zuckerberg said he didn’t record the conversations where Biden officials were “screaming” and “cursing” but there are emails.
He also commiserated with Rogan about his “journey” toward distrusting the media, telling the podcast host, “The stuff that’s being written about is not all accurate, and even if the facts are right, it’s kind of written from a slant a lot of the time.”
Zuckerberg cozied up to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, and donated $1 million to his inaugural fund, following several months of taking on a more friendly tone toward the president-elect.
via: Daily Beast
