Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on"The Joe Rogan Experience" that the Biden administration retaliated against his company when he refused to censor memes about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zuckerberg, whose interview aired Friday, said the White House wanted him to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, from "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," with a caption "10 years from now you're going to see an ad that says if you took a COVID vaccine you'd be eligible for a payment."
"They're like, 'No, you have to take that down,'" Zuckerberg said. "And we just said, 'No, we're not, we're not gonna take down humor and satire."
Zuckerberg said the Biden administration would regularly call up Meta and scream and curse.
'Basically, it just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not going to take down things that are true,'" Zuckerberg said.
Later, Biden, accused social media companies of "killing people."
"All these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating, coming after our company," Zuckerburg said. "It was brutal."
In August, Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee he would now push back if the Biden administration pressured him to censor COVID-19 content again.
"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg wrote in his letter. "I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."
Zuckerberg also said it was wrong for his social media platforms to suppress news coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop before the 2020 election.
"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," Zuckerberg wrote.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Sam Barron ✉
Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.
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