Mark Zuckerberg says Biden pushed Meta to remove posts about vaccines

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Joe Rogan told him in one the podcast published on Friday that his company had been pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about the side effects of Covid vaccines.

At the start of an interview that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that overall he is “spreading vaccines” and that there are “more positives than negatives.”

“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they’re also trying to censor basically anyone who’s arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said.

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

The notices come a few days after Meta said so stop trusting to verify facts posted by third parties on widely used apps and instead refer to community notes to allow users to add comments about veracity. The strategy places more Meta with X, whose owner, Elon Muskhe has been advising the candidate for president Donald Trump and was the main sponsor of his campaign.

It’s also the latest in Trump’s post-election announcements and comments that appear aimed at placating the incoming president. last week, Meta Nick Clegg was replaced as its global affairs president by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of current policy and a former Republican Party staffer.

It was a goal several large technology companies to announce that he was contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News notify

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

“The fact that a millionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from now on we’re not going to verify anything, and, you know, when you get millions of people online, reading this stuff, it’s like that, 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 one the letter In August, Zuckerberg told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee that the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that the company regretted some of the decisions it made after those requests.

“And they pushed us really hard to get rid of things that were true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines can have side effects, you basically have to get rid of it.”

Zuckerberg did not specify who made the requests from the White House, saying, “I was not directly involved in those conversations.” But he said the company’s response would not remove “essentially true content.”

Food and Drug Administration he said in 2021 headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever were the most common side effects Johnson & Johnson’s one shot covid vaccine. All over the world, there are Covid vaccines credited saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic raged.

On another issue, Zuckerberg said the US government has not done enough to protect its tech industry, leaving too much power to foreign regulators. According to him, the European Union has fined technology companies more than 30 billion dollars in the last 20 years.

“One of the things I’m optimistic about President Trump is, I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.

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