Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alleged on Friday's episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" that Biden administration officials pressured Facebook employees to remove certain content.
"We had people from the Biden administration calling our team and yelling and insulting us," Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan. "We got to the point where we said, 'No, we're not going to remove things that are factual. That's absurd.'"
The White House declined to immediately comment on Zuckerberg's comments.
This is not the first time the Facebook co-founder has said that administration officials have pressured the company. In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan last year, Zuckerberg said the White House had repeatedly pressured Facebook to remove "certain content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire."
Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had complied with these requests in some cases, but said it would make different decisions in the future. “In hindsight and with new information, we sometimes see that our decisions were wrong,” he said.
The White House said in a statement at the time: “As we face a deadly pandemic, this administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear: technology companies and other private entities must consider the implications of the information they provide, while making independent choices.”
Zuckerberg said in the podcast that the administration had asked Facebook to remove a meme that featured actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing to a television image advertising a lawsuit for COVID vaccine users. “They said you have to take it down,” Zuckerberg said. “And we said, ‘No, we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We won't delete things that reflect the truth.'"
The meme was used as evidence in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2023, in which Louisiana, Missouri, and some Facebook users sought to bar government officials from communicating with the social media platform.
But the Supreme Court rejected the case 6-3, saying the platforms had strengthened their content moderation policies without government interference.
The comments came days after Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be shutting down its fact-checking program and replacing it with a community-based structure similar to the "Community Notes" system on Platform X. He also announced that Facebook and Instagram would be relaxing their rules on political content.
