White House wanted Facebook to censor Covid-19 memes – Zuckerberg

Government officials “screamed and cursed” when the platform initially refused, the tech billionaire said

Facebook initially balked at censoring satirical memes about Covid-19 vaccines until US government officials screamed, cursed and threatened them into doing so, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the platform’s parent company Meta, has said.

Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Friday, Zuckerberg addressed his company’s censorship both during the 2020 election and afterward, seemingly blaming it on government pressure.

“I don’t think that the pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “At some level, I do think that having people in the administration calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true...it’s pretty bad.”

According to Zuckerberg, the ban on censorship in the US Constitution does not apply to “content moderation” by private companies, “but the First Amendment does apply to government, that’s like the whole point.”

The supposedly offensive content that the White House wanted taken down was a meme featuring a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, showing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character reacting to something he saw on TV. The meme implied it would be an ad for a class-action suit for vaccine injuries in about a decade’s time.
President Joe Biden made a vaccine mandate one of the key planks of his Covid-19 policy and in July 2021 claimed that social media were “killing people” by allowing “misinformation” about the jabs to be posted. 

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Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary at the time, revealed that the government was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook,” and even argued that various social media platforms should coordinate their rules and terms of service so that a person “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others… for providing misinformation out there.”

Meanwhile, the controversial UK-based NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed that the White House was relying on its research into “superspreaders” of  “misinformation.”

Facebook reacted to Biden and Psaki’s comments by saying they had been pushing strongly for vaccines and boasting of having censored 18 million “instances of Covid-19 misinformation” and shadow-banned “167 million pieces of Covid-19 content” deemed untrue by its fact-checkers.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced the end of Facebook’s fact-checking program, describing it as “too politically biased” and counterproductive. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” he said. 

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Having donated over $400 million of his own money to help the Democrats in 2020, Zuckerberg refrained from doing so last November. He also visited President-elect Donald Trump in Florida to make amends and donate to his inauguration fund.

When Rogan pressed him on the censorship of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop – which got the oldest daily newspaper locked out of Twitter and shadow-banned from Facebook in October 2020 – Zuckerberg dodged the issue.

Meta handed “all the documents” related to censorship efforts over to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said, noting that Ohio Republican Jim Jordan put together a report and made it public.

“Well, they lost the election,” he responded, when Rogan asked whether anyone in the current administration was held responsible.