Big Tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration bullied people at his company to censor information on his platform, Breitbart reported. The Meta CEO made these remarks on the The Joe Rogan Experience podcast released Friday.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, censorship was at an all-time high. Now Zuckerberg has confirmed what many suspected: President Joe Biden's administration was behind it.
Zuckerberg said that "people in the Biden administration" pushed the company "super hard" to shut down dissent over the vaccines even if it was "true" information. "These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse," Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said that he was trying to do the right thing during the pandemic but soon realized it was top-down censorship. "Now, I’m generally pretty pro rolling out vaccines," Zuckerberg told Rogan.
"I think, on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative, but I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that, honestly, were true," Zuckerberg revealed.
"They basically pushed us and said, ‘Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down," Zuckerberg said. Rogan asked who was the "they" he was referring to.
"It was people in the Biden Administration," Zuckerberg confirmed. "I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly," he was quick to point out.
"These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse," the 40-year-old executive said. Zuckerberg said they would also demand he take down memes that joked about class action lawsuits about the vaccine in a decade.
This revelation on Rogan's program comes on the heels of Zuckerberg's announcement that Facebook will no longer use fact-checkers. "We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms," he said on Tuesday, according to the New York Post.
"As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our team," Zuckerberg added. He admitted this was to fix the mistakes of the past.
"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. It’s gone too far," Zuckerberg concluded.
This is quite an about-face for the Meta mogul, whose change of heart came after President-elect Donald Trump won in November. He was seen dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November, and Meta donated $1 million to his inaugural fund.
Zuckerberg is finally doing the right thing, but the censorship and bullying should never have happened in the first place. Trump's election has been a game changer, and that's most evident when people like Zuckerberg are falling in line.
