Mark Zuckerberg says Biden pushed Meta to remove posts on vaccines

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg he told Joe Rogan in a podcast announced 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, in general, he is “pretty professional to launch vaccines” and that they are “more positive than negative.”

“But I think while they’re trying to push this program, they’re also trying to censor everybody who’s basically arguing,” Zuckerberg said.

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

The remarks come days after Meta said he would stop trusting on third parties to verify the facts published on their widely used applications and instead of returning to community notes, which allow users to add comments regarding the truth. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, than the owner, Elon Muskadvised the president-elect Donald Trump and was a major supporter of his campaign.

It’s also the latest in a series of ads and comments since Trump’s election that appear aimed at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Meta replaced its 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 many large technology companies to announce that he contributed $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 point on, we’re not going to verify anything, and, you know, when you have millions of people going online, reading this stuff, it’s — anyway , I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.

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

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

“And 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 just need to get rid of them.”

Zuckerberg did not specify who from the White House made the questions, saying, “I was not involved in those conversations directly.” But he said that the company’s response was that it was not going to remove the content that “is inarguably 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 One shot Covid vaccine. In the whole world, the Covid vaccines are credit with saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic was raging.

In a separate matter, 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.

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

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