Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in an episode of the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” released on Friday (10) that Biden administration officials were pressuring the Facebook team to remove content that the administration viewed as misinformation on the platform.
“Basically, these people in the Biden administration were calling our team and yelling at them and swearing at them, and it was like it was documented, it was all kind of out there,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that the government tried to get Meta to remove a meme that suggested people who got the Covid-19 vaccine would end up being part of class action lawsuits.
Earlier this week, Meta announced that , adding new types of content that users can now post on Meta-owned platforms that were previously prohibited.
“We’ve been pressure tested on this issue for the last 8 to 10 years with these big institutions putting pressure on us, and I feel like this is the right place to move forward,” he said during the podcast.
Zuckerberg also stated in the interview with Joe Rogan that he had been working on the changes announced this week “for a long time.”
“The purpose of social media is to give people the ability to share what they want. This goes back to our original mission, which is just to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said.
The CEO said he has been on a “journey” over the last decade, starting out “very much in favor of free speech,” but President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and pressure from the Biden administration to moderate misinformation about Covid-19 in Social networks have changed your vision.
“I kind of think in 2016 and after that I gave a lot of deference to a lot of people in the media who were basically saying ‘Okay, there was no way (Trump) could have been elected except for misinformation. People can’t really believe this stuff,’” Zuckerberg said.
He stated that fact-checking and content moderation have reached a point where they have “destroyed trust” in the platform.
