OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:08 PM – Friday, January 10, 2025
According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, the Biden administration forced Meta employees to censor a particular COVID-19-related meme across the platform.
He also noted that the president’s staff would scream and curse at workers to take down any content that the administration did not approve of.
The 40-year-old CEO explained to Rogan that he was taken aback when the White House contacted him in order to request that a meme depicting actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a television in the film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” be removed.
However, it was a specific caption, which was pasted over the movie still-turned-meme, that prompted worry for the administration.
“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,” was the caption in question that caused distress for the Biden administration.
Seemingly attempting to gain favor with the incoming administration, and since platform-inputted “fact-check” corrections often lead online users to believe the opposite, Zuckerberg drastically reduced Meta’s fact-checking staff and tools this week, before making an appearance on the world’s most popular podcast.
Additionally, Meta also announced that all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs have been discontinued, effective immediately, on the same day that the Rogan episode aired. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial and gender discrimination should not be allowed or encouraged, Axios first revealed an internal note informing Meta staff that the move was made due to a shifting “legal and policy landscape” in relation to DEI.
Zuckerberg explained that the meme was “sort of like a class action lawsuit type meme,” and he personally perceived it as a harmless political joke, ultimately confused why the Biden administration had reacted so negatively to it.
Zuckerberg continued, claiming that he and his team told the Biden administration: “No we’re not, we’re not going to take down humor,” in response to being instructed to remove the meme from the platform.
Zuckerberg also described how Biden’s team would urge Meta workers to filter out factual information, such as the possibility of negative effects from COVID-19 vaccines.
“Anything that says vaccines have [bad] side effects, you need to take down,” Zuckerberg remarked, adding that the White House “pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true.”
“Basically, it just got to this point where we were like, no, we’re not going to take down things that are true,” Zuckerberg continued. “That’s ridiculous.”
For most of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration worked to minimize myocarditis, a dangerous heart condition that was connected to vaccines developed to combat the virus.
Although it was not highlighted in the podcast, the National Library of Medicine website, which is run by the National Institutes of Health, has since reported some very concerning information in regards to myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines.
“We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a 2500% increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021. Demographic data revealed that myocarditis occurred most in youths (50%) and males (69%). A total of 76% of cases resulted in emergency care and hospitalization. Of the total myocarditis reports, 92 individuals died (3%). Myocarditis was more likely after dose 2 (p < 0.00001) and individuals less than 30 years of age were more likely than individuals older than 30 to acquire myocarditis (p < 0.00001).”
Prior to its release on Friday afternoon, Rogan did not disclose Zuckerberg’s appearance in advance, as is customary with his podcast.
As of January 10th at 4:41 p.m. (PST) the episode now has 1,450,972 views altogether, and that’s not including all of the views on the popular music and podcast platform Spotify, which also uploads Rogan’s episodes.
Biden’s public statement regarding how social media memes that contradicted his pandemic narrative were “killing people” marked a turning point in Zuckerberg’s strategy for censoring under the president’s orders, the Meta CEO continued.
“All these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company,” he added.
“It was brutal, brutal.”
The Biden administration’s threats to remove content “sounds illegal,” Rogan responded, and it may have violated online users’ First Amendment right to free speech, he continued.
“And you weren’t killing people,” Rogan noted. He then expressed that the bizarre demands were obviously a “massive overstepping” on the part of the federal government.
“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.”
“Did you record any of those phone calls? God, I want to listen,” Rogan continued.
“They were suppressing this stuff because they didn’t want people to think that you could get away with not taking the vaccine, which is really crazy,” he argued. “It scared the s*** out of a lot of people.”
The head of Meta has also made a number of public remarks in recent months regarding censorship, including the shocking admission in August that he felt “pressured” to comply with the Biden administration’s demands.
Zuckerberg financially contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund following the 2024 election in November.
“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.
“More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg continued.
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