Mark Zuckerberg Says Biden Admin Pushed to Censor COVID Vaccine Posts, Memes

‘They pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true,’ the Meta CEO says.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about the Orion AR glasses during the Meta Connect conference in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2024. Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo

Meta and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a new interview this week that Biden administration staff pressured his company into censoring COVID-19 posts and memes.

“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and ... scream at them and curse,” the Facebook founder said during a Friday appearance of the “Joe Rogan Experience.”

Zuckerberg said that White House officials became the “most extreme” about targeting certain posts “when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program” in 2021.

“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 told Rogan.

“They basically pushed us and said, ‘anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’”

Recalling what he told White House officials, Zuckerberg said, “I was just like, ‘well, we’re just not going to do that.’”

The two most popular COVID-19 vaccines, produced by Pfizer and Moderna, are now mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to include warnings about possible side effects such as myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation—namely in younger males.

“I’m generally pretty pro-vaccine. I think on the balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative,” he told Rogan.

Zuckerberg said that at first, he was “sympathetic” to removing certain posts on Facebook “at the beginning of COVID.” The situation soon changed.

“When it went from ‘two weeks to flatten the curve,’ in the beginning it was, ‘There weren’t enough masks,’ ‘masks aren’t that important,’ to then it’s ‘Oh, now you have to wear a mask.’ Everything was shifting around. It just became really difficult to ... follow,” he said.

“They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo Dicaprio looking at a TV talking about in how, ten years from now or something, you’re gonna see an ad that says if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible ... for payment—a sort of class action lawsuit-type meme.”

Zuckerberg said his team pushed back on the removal request.

“We said ‘No, we’re not gonna take down humor and satire. We’re not gonna take down things that are true,’” he said.

When pressed by Rogan about who in the Biden administration asked Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to take down the posts, Zuckerberg did not name individuals.

“It was people in the Biden administration. I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly,” he said.

Overall, Zuckerberg had a critical tone in describing his companies’ interactions with the Biden administration for what he said was an overstepping of its authority in requesting that posts be taken down about the pandemic. He previously wrote about such complaints to Congress in a letter published last August.

Zuckerberg’s comments to Rogan mark a shift by his companies to align more with recent broader trends across social media, coming after billionaire Elon Musk purchased social media company Twitter (now X) and declared himself a “free speech absolutist.” Earlier this week, he said Meta would end its fact-checking programs and promote more free expression.

“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 in a video released Tuesday.

Zuckerberg recently appeared at a dinner with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and pledged a donation of $1 million to his inauguration committee.

The Epoch Times contacted the White House press office for comment and received no response as of Friday.