Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a Podcast published on Friday that his company was being pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about Covid vaccine uncomfortable side effects.
At the beginning of a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “pretty pro-vaccine rollout” and that they were “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they're trying to push this agenda, they've also tried to censor anyone who fundamentally argues against it,” Zuckerberg said.
A representative for the Biden administration didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta said it could now not depend on third parties to confirm facts posted on its widely used applications and would as an alternative depend on community notes to permit users so as to add comments on veracity. The strategy puts Meta more in keeping with X, whose owner Elon Musk advised President-elect Donald Trump and was a key supporter of his campaign.
It can also be the newest in a series of announcements and comments following Trump's election that appear aimed toward appeasing the brand new president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of worldwide affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the corporate's current political vice chairman and former Republican Party staffer.
Meta was one in all several major tech firms to announce that it contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration. NBC News reported.
President Biden addressed Meta's fact-checking policy change during a press conference on Friday.
“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and, by the way, say that from now on we're not going to fact-check anything and, you know, when millions of people go online and read this stuff, “That's it – not less than that's what I feel “It’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Zuckerberg has criticized the Biden administration's handling of Covid-related content prior to now.
In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted a number of the decisions that made that occur I met firms based on these inquiries.
“And they pushed us super hard to eliminate the things that were, quite frankly, true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said anything that says vaccines could have side effects you basically have to remove.”
Zuckerberg didn’t specify who throughout the White House made the requests, saying, “I was not directly involved in those conversations.” But he said the corporate's response was that it could not remove content that “somehow are undeniably true.”
The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that the most common side effects were headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever Johnson & Johnson's Single shot Covid vaccine. There are Covid vaccines worldwide credited As the pandemic raged, we saved tens of millions of lives every year.
On a separate topic, Zuckerberg said the U.S. government hasn't done enough to protect its tech industry and has given too much power to regulators abroad. He said the European Union has imposed more than $30 billion in fines against technology companies over the past 20 years.
“I'm bullish on President Trump because I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
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