“Basically, it just got to this point where we were like, no, we’re not going to take down things that are true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “That’s ridiculous.”
The Facebook billionaire described a specific meme of DiCaprio pointing at a TV from the Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which he said “poked fun” at how “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 in sort of like a class action lawsuit.”
After the Biden administration asked Facebook to take down the meme, Zuckerberg claimed he and his team said: “No, we’re not going to take down humor.”
Zuckerberg said the White House “pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true,” and “said anything that says vaccines have side effects, you need to take down.”
The face of Meta’s appearance on the podcast comes after recent attempts to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration, including dramatically axing the tech company’s team of fact-checkers.
Axios also revealed the company terminated all of its DEI programs effective immediately.
Zuckerberg said a turning point for his approach to censorship under Biden came when the president publicly stated social media memes combatting his pandemic narrative were “killing people.”
He told Rogan: “All these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company … It was brutal, brutal.”
Rogan said the demands were clearly a “massive overstepping” from the federal government, adding: “And also, you weren’t killing people.”
“This is the thing with all of this, they suppressed so much information about things that people should be doing, regardless of whether or not you believe in the vaccine,” he added. “Did you record any of those phone calls? God, I want to listen.”