Biden Administration Urged Meta Employees to Eliminate Accurate Vaccine Information and Censor Memes – One America News Network
OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:08 PM – Friday, January 10, 2025
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week that the Biden administration pressured Meta employees to remove a specific COVID-19 meme from the platform.
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He recounted instances where staff from the White House would shout and use profanity, insisting that content deemed unfavorable by the administration be taken down.
The 40-year-old leader expressed surprise when he received an inquiry from the White House asking for the removal of a meme featuring actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a television from the movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
It turned out that a particular caption overlaid on the meme sparked concern for the administration.
The problematic caption was: “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,” which raised alarms for the Biden administration.
In an effort to build rapport with the new administration, Zuckerberg drastically cut down Meta’s fact-checking staff and resources, just prior to appearing on the highly influential podcast. On the same day, Meta announced the immediate discontinuation of all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives.
Following a Supreme Court ruling against racial and gender discrimination, Axios first disclosed an internal memo indicating that this decision stemmed from a changing “legal and policy landscape” regarding DEI.
Zuckerberg explained that he viewed the meme as “a sort of class action lawsuit type meme” and insisted that it was merely a harmless political joke, perplexed by the administration’s strong reaction.
He claimed that his team responded to the Biden administration with, “No, we’re not going to take down humor,” when instructed to remove the meme.
Zuckerberg elaborated on how the Biden administration pressured Meta to suppress factual information, specifically regarding potential adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
He stated, “Anything that says vaccines have [bad] side effects, you need to take down,” adding that the White House was “super aggressive” in pushing Meta to remove content that was, in fact, truthful.
“It just reached a point where we said, no, we’re not taking down things that are true. That’s absurd,” Zuckerberg reinforced.
While not highlighted during the podcast, the National Library of Medicine, operated by the National Institutes of Health, later released concerning findings related to myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines.
The report indicated that the number of myocarditis cases reported to VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times greater than the average for all vaccines over the past 30 years. This marked a 2500% rise in the absolute number of reports during the first year of the vaccination campaign compared to historical data before 2021. Among the demographic data, myocarditis was most prevalent in youths (50%) and males (69%), with 76% of cases requiring emergency care and hospitalization. Of the reported myocarditis cases, 92 individuals (3%) died, and it was more likely to occur after the second dose (p < 0.00001), especially among individuals under 30 years of age compared to those older than 30 years (p < 0.00001).
Throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration focused on downplaying concerns about myocarditis, a serious heart condition linked to the vaccines developed to fight the virus.
Prior to its release on Friday afternoon, Rogan had not announced Zuckerberg’s guest appearance in advance, which is his usual practice.
Within less than 45 minutes, the interview garnered over 200,000 views on YouTube. As of January 10th at 4:41 p.m. (PT), the episode has accumulated a total of 1,450,972 views, not including the significant numbers on Spotify, where Rogan also shares his episodes.
Zuckerberg mentioned during the Friday episode that Biden’s public comments suggesting that social media memes countering his pandemic narrative were “killing people” marked a pivotal shift in Zuckerberg’s approach to censorship under the president’s directives.
“Various agencies and branches of government began investigating and targeting our company,” he recounted.
“It was a brutal experience,” he added.
Rogan remarked that the Biden administration’s threats to censor content “seem illegal,” suggesting they could violate online users’ First Amendment rights.
“And you weren’t actually killing anyone,” Rogan pointed out, emphasizing that the government’s demands appeared to be a “huge overreach.”
“This entire situation: they suppressed so much information about alternatives that people should consider, whether or not they endorse the vaccine,” he argued.
“Did you happen to record any of those phone calls? I would love to listen to them,” Rogan expressed.
“They were suppressing information because they aimed to prevent people from thinking that opting out of the vaccine was a viable choice, which is really insane. It terrified a lot of people,” he said.
Zuckerberg has recently made several public comments regarding censorship, including a shocking admission in August that he felt “pressured” to comply with the requests from the Biden administration.
After his financial contribution of $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund following the November 2024 election, Zuckerberg stated:
“We’re returning to our core mission of minimizing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and re-establishing free expression on our platforms,” he said.
“More specifically, we will eliminate fact-checkers and introduce community notes akin to what X is doing, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg added.
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