Biden administration forces Facebook to censor content related to Covid-19 vaccine

Washington: Meta Facebook was forced to remove material about COVID-19 vaccinations by the Biden administration, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday. The claim was made by Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Podcast.

Zuckerberg discussed the problem of government censorship during the multi-topic conversation, saying, “This hit the most extreme.” When they were attempting to implement the vaccination program, I would assume it was during the Biden Administration. Although I usually support the introduction of vaccinations and believe that overall, they have more benefits than drawbacks, I believe that in an effort to promote the program, they also attempted to silence those who opposed it.

“They put a lot of pressure on us to remove things that were really accurate. We were essentially pushed by them, saying, “You know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you need to take down,” to which Zuckerberg responded, “But we’re not going to do that.”

He said that he was instructed “to take down things that talk about vaccine side effects” by Biden Administration officials.

“We produced all these documents and it’s all in the public domain,” Mark Zuckerberg remarked, referring to the committee and probe established to examine the government censorship. These Biden administration officials would summon our staff and yell at them while cursing.

“It just reached this point where we were like, No, we’re not going to take down true things,” Zuckerberg said. That is absurd. They would want us to remove this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio staring at a TV and stating that, in ten years or so, you will see an advertisement saying, “Okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you are eligible for this kind of payment,” which is similar to a class action lawsuit.

And they say, “No, you need to remove that.” We responded that humor and satire would not be eradicated. True things won’t be destroyed by us. Then, I suppose, I don’t know, it turned around a little. At one point, Biden made a statement—I’m not sure whether it was to journalists or at a news conference—that said, “These guys are killing people.” And then, I don’t know, all these various government divisions and agencies just kind of began looking into and pursuing our business. It was cruel, it was. It was cruel.

According to the New York Post, Zuckerberg had earlier declared that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was closing its censor-susceptible fact-checking shop in the US and replacing it with a user-driven “Community Notes” system similar to X’s in an effort to further democratize Facebook and guarantee freedom online.