REVEALED: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook was pressured to censor content on Trump, Covid, vaccine side effects

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, during which he revealed that Facebook faced "massive institutional pressure" to "start censoring content on ideological grounds" after Trump’s election and during the Covid pandemic.

Speaking on the pandemic, Zuckerberg said that "everything was shifting around" in terms of information, and that "this really hit the most extreme I'd say, it was during the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. He said "I think on balance, the vaccines 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." 

"And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true," he added. "They basically pushed us in and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down."

Zuckerberg said that it was "really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for, like, ideological-based censorship, and I think it was two main events that really triggered this. These two events, he said, was the 2016 election of Trump which also coincided with Brexit, and the 2020 pandemic.

"I think that those were basically these two events where, for the first time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds."

He said that looking back on 2016 and the aftermath, "I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who are basically saying, okay there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation. People can’t actually believe this stuff, right? It has to be that there’s this kind of, like, massive misinformation out there."

He said that "some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time," later adding, "so I took this in and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith and I said, okay, well there are concerns about misinformation."

"We should, just like when people raised other concerns in the past and we try to deal with them, okay, yeah, you know, if you ask people, no one says that they want misinformation. So maybe there's something that we should do to basically try to address this," Zuckerberg said. "But I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world, or that's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service."