Mark Zuckerberg Tells Joe Rogan That Biden Administration Acted Like Totalitarians With Censorship Demands
Days after announcing plans to "restore free speech" across all Meta platforms, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pulled back the curtains on the decision in an interview with Joe Rogan.
Zuckerberg described how the Biden administration had harassed his employees in an effort to get them to censor factual content related to COVID-19, particularly the vaccines.
"These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse," he said to Rogan. "They pushed us super hard to take down the things that were honestly true. They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down."
"We basically got to this point where it was, 'No, we are not going to take things down that are true. That is ridiculous."
The Biden administration also demanded Meta remove certain memes, as in satire.
"They wanted us to take down this meme of DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about [how] you're gonna see an ad that says, 'If you took a COVID vaccine,' you're eligible for this type of payment …. I said, no, we're not gonna take down humor and satire," Zuckerberg said, not so jokingly.
After Zuckerberg finally pushed back at the administration, he said Joe Biden "flipped a bit."
"Biden gave some statement to journalists, basically saying [Meta] is killing people. Then all these different agencies and branches of government started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal."
You can watch the full segment below:
Biden officials ‘screamed’ and ‘cursed’ at Meta Execs, Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan
The government has no right to pressure and browbeat private companies into censorship Americans. An OutKick column from early Friday explains why that is a violation of the Constitution:
Facebook and Twitter did not act alone when censoring Americans for the benefit of the Democratic Party. Per Zuckerberg and documents that Musk released to the press, both platforms were heavily influenced by the FBI, the Democratic National Committee, and the Biden administration.
Meaning, Facebook and Twitter enabled the government to skirt the First Amendment by censoring ordinary Americans on its behalf. In doing so, legal analysts from the Wall Street Journal believe Facebook and Twitter acted not as "private companies" but as "state actors," which can be sued as such.
You can read that full column below:
Covid censorship
Friday isn't the first time Zuckerberg admitted to the government trying to influence what type of content Meta allows across its platforms.
In 2022, Zuckerberg also explained to Rogan how the FBI was behind the censoring of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story as the agency falsely dismissed the report as "Russian propaganda."
Of course, the report was not Russian propaganda. The report was accurate.
And Meta's censoring of the report may have swung the election in Joe Biden's favor. Notably, at least one in six Biden voters say they would have changed their vote had they been aware of the report's validity.
Censorship is the first order of business for a totalitarian. By definition, the Biden administration acted with totalitarian ambitions.
For that exact reason, we warned before the November election that free speech was on the ballot. Luckily, Donald Trump won. Biden and the censors lost.