At one point during the Covid pandemic, someone from the Biden administration privately reached out to Meta with an urgent demand: Users of Meta’s family of apps, including Instagram and Facebook, were sharing a meme depicting Leonardo DiCaprio enthusiastically pointing at a TV set, which is announcing that anyone who took the Covid vaccine is eligible to participate in a class-action lawsuit. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Biden team was emphatic. Meta needed to take posts with that image down.
Zuckerberg shared that revelation in a new podcast interview with Joe Rogan, which you can check out below — and which may also provide some context into Zuckerberg’s thinking this week, when he announced that Meta is getting out of the third-party fact-checking game. To that last point, the new era that’s about to begin for his apps sounds like it will be one of the much looser restrictions and the lightest possible touch when it comes to content moderation.
Based on his new comments to Rogan, my suspicion is that having the White House breathing down his neck probably helped set him down this path. After all, private sector companies like Meta aren’t supposed to be mouthpieces or appendages of the federal government’s messaging operation. “It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said during the Rogan interview about the Biden administration’s heavy-handed approach during the pandemic — which at one point included, as Zuckerberg recounts, administration representatives literally screaming at Meta’s team to censor content.
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream and curse,” the Meta CEO continued. “They pushed us super hard to take down things that were true… anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”
And then the president weighed in.
“Biden, he gave some statement … where he basically was like, ‘These guys are killing people,'” Zuckerberg said, which seemed to be a reference to comments Biden made to reporters at the White House in 2021. As reported at the time by outlets including Reuters, Biden said that online platforms like Facebook “are killing people” for not policing misinformation to the degree that the White House thought they should.
“They’re killing people. … Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” Biden said during his remarks (which he later walked back).
Zuckerberg said the administration then continued to ramp up its strong-arm tactics. “And then, I don’t know … then, like, all these different agencies and branches of government basically started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal. It was brutal.”
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg kind of hinted at all this when he sent a letter to Republican congressman Jim Jordan that basically said the administration was wrong to pressure his companies to censor certain Covid-related content (“including humor and satire”). And that Meta was wrong to comply with those requests as fully as it did. “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own those decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg’s letter read.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
