Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Target CEO Mark Zuckerberg he told Joe Rogan ua podcast announced on Friday that his company had been pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about the side effects of the Covid vaccine.
At the beginning of the conversation, which lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that in general he was “pretty much in favor of introducing vaccines” and that they were “more positive than negative.”
“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they’ve also tried to censor anybody who basically opposes it,” Zuckerberg said.
A representative of the Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The remarks come days after Meta said it would stop relying third parties to verify facts posted on widely used apps and instead turn to community annotations, allowing users to add comments regarding veracity. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, which it owns Elon Muskhe advised the newly elected president Donald Trump and was the main supporter of his campaign.
It is also the latest in a series of posts and comments after Trump’s election that seem to be aimed at pleasing the incoming president. last week, Target 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.
The target was one of them several large technology companies announce that he is giving $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC news reported.
Zuckerberg has criticized the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content in the past.
ua letter To the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration “pressured” Met to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made following those requests.
“And they pushed us hard to remove things that were frankly true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says vaccines could have side effects, you basically have to remove.”
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 was that it would not remove content that was “undoubtedly true in some way.”
Food and Drug Administration he said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever were the most common side effects Johnson & Johnson’s disposable vaccine against Covid. Worldwide, vaccines against Covid are deserving saving tens of millions of lives a year as the pandemic raged.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg said the US government has not done enough to protect its tech industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said the European Union has fined tech companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.
“One of the things I’m optimistic about with President Trump is that I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
WATCH: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or an information vehicle?
