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January 14, 2025 Censorship/Surveillance COVID News

COVID

Zuckerberg: White House Would ‘Scream’ and ‘Curse’ at Facebook Staff to Remove COVID Content

In a Jan. 10 interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said communications from the White House included demands to remove social media posts containing true information.

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Biden administration officials would “scream” and “curse” at Facebook staff and demand they remove COVID-19-related posts that didn’t toe the line on the government narrative, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Jan. 10 interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

The communications from the White House included demands to remove posts containing true information, Zuckerberg said. He said these actions broke the law and violated the First Amendment.

Zuckerberg made these revelations during a wide-ranging three-hour surprise interview on Rogan’s podcast that has garnered over 6.5 million views on YouTube.

Zuckerberg appeared on the podcast days after he announced the end of Facebook’s third-party “fact-checking” program. He told Rogan he would seek to reestablish Facebook as a platform where free speech would be protected.

Biden wanted Meta to remove posts about vaccine side effects

Zuckerberg spent much of the interview recounting the pressures from the White House to censor COVID-19-related content on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram.

The Biden administration “basically pushed us and said … anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, ‘Well, we’re not gonna do that,’” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg recalled that Biden administration officials were “calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true.” He said Meta has documents containing these threats.

According to Zuckerberg, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta “deferred” to government guidance relating to health measures, because he was “sympathetic” to concerns regarding misinformation. He said that this proved to be costly.

“Since then, I think generally, trust in media has fallen off a cliff,” Zuckerberg said. He blamed the mistrust on mixed messaging by the government and public health authorities regarding COVID-19.

“In the beginning, it was like, ‘OK, there aren’t enough masks,’ ‘masks aren’t that important,’ to then … ‘Oh, no, you have to wear a mask’ … everything was shifting around. It just became very difficult to kind of follow,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said demands from the Biden administration to censor posts grew after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, after which government officials began pressuring Meta “super hard” to remove specific posts.

“Basically it just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not going to … take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous,’” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said President Joe Biden then attacked social media platforms, saying in July 2021 that “these guys are killing people” by allowing alleged COVID-19 misinformation to remain on their platforms. Biden later walked back these remarks, claiming that “Facebook isn’t killing people” — the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” were.

“These 12 people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” Biden said according to Newsweek.

The Disinformation Dozen” is a list of the 12 “leading online anti-vaxxers,” authored by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), was included on this list.

CHD has lawsuits pending against Biden administration officials and Meta for censoring content.

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Rogan, Zuckerberg hold different views on COVID vaccines

Zuckerberg told Rogan that even after Biden walked back his remarks, White House officials and government agencies began pursuing Meta with “brutal” investigations. He cited an example of content the White House wanted removed:

“They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how 10 years from now or something … you’re gonna see an ad that says, ‘OK, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re … eligible for this kind of payment’ … this sort of like class action lawsuit-type meme.

“[The Biden administration was] like, ‘No, you have to take that down.’ And we just said, ‘No, we’re not gonna take down humor and satire.’”

Zuckerberg said he felt the Biden administration’s goal “to get everyone vaccinated was actually … a good goal” and that he is “generally pretty pro-rolling out vaccines.”

Rogan said the White House sought to suppress content about COVID-19 vaccine injuries and alternative treatments “because they didn’t want people to think that you could get away with not taking the vaccine, which is really crazy.”

Zuckerberg argued that “on balance … it’s good for more people to get the vaccine,” but Rogan said “there’s a bunch of problems” with this claim.

“There’s the emergency use authorization that they needed in order to get this pushed through. And you can’t have that without valid therapeutics being available. And so, they suppressed valid therapeutics,” Rogan said.

Despite his continued support for vaccines, Zuckerberg said he felt the government ran afoul of the law and Constitution by attempting to censor online content. “I don’t think that the [government] pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal … the First Amendment does apply to the government.”

‘Massive institutional pressure’ led Facebook to institute fact-checking

According to Zuckerberg, government pressure on Facebook to censor content began in 2016, following Donald Trump’s electoral victory that year and the referendum vote in favor of Brexit in the United Kingdom. Zuckerberg said these two events resulted in massive institutional pressure” on Facebook to institute fact-checking.

Zuckerberg described the fact-checking process as “something out of … 1984” and said that due to the pressure his platforms faced, “we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s fact-checking program would be replaced with a model akin to X’s “Community Notes” feature — a move Biden subsequently criticized. Zuckerberg said the previous fact-checking model resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The announcement that Meta was ending its fact-checking program came one day after CHD asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its censorship case against Meta. In an op-ed published last week by RealClearPolitics and the New York Post, CHD CEO Mary Holland said Zuckerberg’s admissions are not enough.

“Meta first took action against CHD in May 2019, from takedowns and restrictions to an outright ban in August 2022 that is still in effect,” Holland said. “They not only kicked us off the platform but censored our supporters and erased our past posts. Meta shut down the ‘free expression’ they claim to be championing.”

Holland noted that while the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor content, the company also voluntarily engaged in such censorship. “Zuckerberg’s WhatsApp messages showed that he conspired with the government and chose to censor because he had ‘bigger fish to fry’ than protecting free speech.”

Holland said CHD’s legal effort against Meta would continue and expressed hope that the Supreme Court would accept the case, writing that “Meta, like the other mega-platforms, must be held accountable.”

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