Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg depicted Biden administration officials reprimanding Facebook employees when they asked to have specific information removed from the social media site in an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that aired on Friday.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan. “We simply reached a point where we said, ‘No, we won’t, we won’t remove things that are true.'” “That is absurd.”
A request for comment from NBC News regarding Zuckerberg’s comments was not immediately answered by the White House.
The Facebook co-founder has previously claimed that government representatives pushed the business to take down material.
Last year, Zuckerberg wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the White House had repeatedly pressed Facebook to take down satirical and humorous COVID-19 content.
Facebook, which is owned by Meta, occasionally complied, Zuckerberg said, adding that future choices will be different. He stated that the business “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn t make today.”
In a statement at the time, the White House said: This Administration promoted reasonable actions to safeguard public health and safety when faced with a terrible pandemic. Our stance has been unambiguous and unwavering: we think private actors, including tech corporations, should consider the impact of their activities on the American people when making their own decisions about the information they display.
Zuckerberg said on Rogan’s program that the government had requested that Facebook take down a meme featuring Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV screen that advertised a class action lawsuit for former Covid vaccination recipients.
We said, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not to take down humor and satire,'” Zuckerberg continued. “They’re like, ‘No, you have to take that down,'” he recalled. Things that are true will not be removed by us.”
In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 2023, House Republicans filed an amicus brief that contained the meme as evidence.
The plaintiffs in that action, who included Missouri, Louisiana, and a number of Facebook users whose posts were degraded or erased, aimed to prevent government representatives from interacting with social media corporations.
In a final 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, citing strong evidence of platforms controlling content without interference from the government.
According to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s judgment, the platforms had actually reinforced their pre-existing content moderation standards before the government defendants became engaged, acting independently.
Zuckerberg’s remarks on Rogan’s podcast follow his announcement a few days earlier that Meta would discontinue its fact-checking program and switch to a community-driven framework modeled by X’s Community Notes system. Additionally, he declared that Facebook and Instagram would loosen their regulations regarding political content.
A number of internet titans, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, have promised to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, including Zuckerberg.