Zuckerberg on Rogan: Facebook's censorship was "something out of 1984"
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Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying.
Why it matters: Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs.
Driving the news: The Meta CEO said a turning point for his approach to censorship came after Biden publicly said social media companies were "killing people" by allowing COVID misinformation to spread, and politicians started coming after the company from all angles.
- Zuckerberg told Rogan, who was a prominent skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccine, that the Biden administration would "call up the guys on our team and yell at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true."
- Zuckerberg said that Biden officials wanted Meta to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, with a joke at the expense of people who were vaccinated. Zuckerberg said his company drew the line at removing "humor and satire."
- But he also said his company had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea — which he said the traditional media had been pushing — that misinformation spreading on social media swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
What he's saying: Zuckerberg said his own company's fact-checking process was "something out of 1984," and led to a broad belief that the fact-checkers his own company employed "were too biased."
- "It really is a slippery slope, and it just got to a point where it's just, OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program."
- He said he was "worried" from the beginning about "becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world." Zuckerberg praised X's "community notes" program as superior to Facebook's model.
- He later suggested that social media creators are replacing the government and traditional media as arbiters of truth, becoming "a new kind of cultural elite that people look up to."
The flip side: Under Meta's newly relaxed moderation policies, women can be compared to household objects, ethnic groups can be called "filth," users can call for the exclusion of gay people from certain professions, and people can refer to a transgender or non-binary person as an "it," Axios' Ina Fried reports.
- That policy change unleashed outrage within the company, even before Zuckerberg announced Meta would also be ending DEI programs, as Axios scooped.
Zoom in: In justifying the content moderation rethink, Zuckerberg told Rogan that Facebook's policies would not have allowed someone to post that women should not be allowed in combat roles in the military — even though Trump's pick to run the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, has publicly called for such a change.
- "If it's OK to say on the floor of Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media," Zuckerberg said.
