Mark Zuckerberg says Biden pushed Met to remove vaccine posts

Meta General director Mark Zuckerberg said Joe Rogan in a podcast revealed on Friday that his campaign was under pressure from the Biden administration to remove content about the side effects of Covid vaccines.

At the beginning of the conversation, which lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he is generally “very much in favor of spreading vaccines” and that there are “more positives than negatives.”

“But I think that while they’re trying to push this agenda, they’re also trying to censor anybody who basically opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.

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

The remarks came days after Meta said he would stop hoping on third parties to verify facts posted on its widely used apps and instead turn to community notes, allowing users to add comments about veracity. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Muskwas a consultant to the president-elect Donald Trump and was one of the main supporters of his campaign.

It’s also the latest in a series of announcements and comments since Trump’s election that appear to be aimed at placating the incoming president. last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the campaign’s current vice president of policy and a former Republican staffer.

Meta was one of the several large technology companies to announce that he contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News reported.

President Biden addressed the change in Meta’s fact-checking policy during a press conference on Friday.

“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and say, by the way, from now on, we’re not going to fact-check anything, and, you know, when millions of people go online and read these things, it’s — anyway, I think that it’s really shameful,” Biden said.

Zuckerberg has been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content in the past.

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

“And they pushed us hard to destroy what was honestly the truth,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines can have side effects should be taken down.”

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

Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, and fever were the most common side effects Johnson and Johnson single dose covid vaccine. There are vaccines against Covid all over the world is counted with the saving of tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic raged.

On a separate issue, Zuckerberg said the US government has not done enough to protect its technology industry by leaving too much power in the hands of regulators overseas. He said the European Union has fined tech companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.

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

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