Zuckerberg says Biden administration pushed Meta 'super hard' to take down vaccine content

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast published Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content on side effects of Covid vaccines.

Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he's generally "pretty pro rolling out vaccines" and that they are "more positive than negative."

"But I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it," Zuckerberg said.

A Biden administration representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The remarks come days after Meta said it would stop relying on third parties to check facts published on its widely used applications and instead turn to community notes, letting users add commentary regarding truthfulness. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been advising President-elect Donald Trump and was a major backer of his campaign.

It's also the latest in a string of announcements and comments following Trump's election that appear targeted at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company's current policy vice president and a former Republican Party staffer.

Meta was one of several large technology companies to announce that it was contributing $1 million to Trump's inauguration, NBC News reported.

Zuckerberg has expressed criticism in the past about the Biden administration's handling of Covid-related content.

In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration "pressured" Meta to "censor" Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions