Mark Zuckerberg Says The Biden Administration Would Call And “Scream” At Meta To Take Down Memes And “Things That Were True”

Could have gone public with this a little sooner, no? Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta (the parent company to Facebook and Instagram) recently announced sweeping changes coming to the way the platform moderates and removes content. In a video earlier this week, Zuckerberg said that Meta would do away with fact-checkers, who he said were too politically biased, and instead implement a community notes system like that over on Twitter/X, along with several other improvements like changes to the way the sites us AI filters to monitor for violations and modifications to the policies that currently restrict speech on controversial topics like immigration and gender: “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. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.” Zuckerberg said that he plans to work with President Trump to help social media promote free speech worldwide, but that he hopes the platforms simplify their systems and get away from moderating political content: “We have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems that are never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing the stakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots on giving people a voice.” Of course much of the criticism Meta has faced in the past has been from the right, who accused the platform of censoring conservative voices. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would often censor or remove content surrounding both the disease and the vaccine that it deemed "misinformation," instead of allowing for debate and dissenting viewpoints. And after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, platforms began limiting the reach of Trump’s posts claiming election interference, before ultimately banning him altogether in the wake of the January 6th protests at the Capitol. It's pretty clear that these platforms have been biased in one direction, and during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration pressured the company to take down memes and posts that it didn't like - including posts that were true. According to Zuckerberg, Meta would often get calls from members of the Biden administration "screaming" and "cursing" at them while demanding that they remove content: "These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse... Basically it just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not going to take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.'" And Zuckerberg admits that at first, they were willing to defer to the government on how to handle the information that was coming out. But at some point, when the guidance kept changing from "two weeks to flatten the curve" and "masks don't work," the Biden administration began to push back: "This really hit the most extreme during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program... While they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true. They basically pushed us and said, 'Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.'" Zuckerberg said that one of the memes in particular was this Leonardo DiCaprio meme: "They're like, 'You have to take that down.' And we just said, 'No, we're not going to take down humor and satire. We're not going to take down things that are true.'" Emails that have been previously released by Congress show the Biden administration's outrage over the meme, claiming that it "demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden Administration is trying to reach." But Zuckerberg said that once the platforms began pushing back, they ended up facing repercussions for not giving in to the government's demands: "Biden gave some statement at some point...where he was basically like, 'These guys are killing people.'  Then all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal." A lot of this information has been made public already, from emails that have been released through Congressional investigations and testimony. But to hear Zuckerberg talk about our government seeking to control what kind of information we can share online is honestly terrifying and should be infuriating to anyone who values free speech, on either side of the aisle. Of course the question remains: Why didn't he speak out about this when it's happening? But then again, he already said that the government came after Meta with investigations as soon as they started pushing back on the Biden administration's demands, so it's really no wonder that they didn't want to poke the bear any further until those were complete. Still, the whole thing should serve as a cautionary tale about the effects of government overreach, and the lengths to which the government is willing to go to control whatever narrative they want to serve to the American people. https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1877787144711967126