Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive of Meta, appeared on the “Joe Rogan Show” Friday, coming shortly after Zuckerberg announced the company’s plans to change content moderation.
The company’s new plans include scrapping fact-checking done by third parties and moving to a system similar to X, including the use of community notes. The company also plans to soften restrictions on political content.
Zuckerberg explained how he wanted to return to his original mission when creating Facebook, which was “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
The company began censoring speech after receiving pressure from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said. “It’s pretty bad” when you have “people in the Biden administration calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take things down that are true,” he told Rogan.
Zuckerberg believes 2 main events led to ideological censorship on his platforms
Even before Biden came into office, Meta began facing “massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds” in 2016 when Donald Trump was running for president in the U.S. and with Brexit happening in Europe.
Zuckerberg said the pressures came under the guise of the Russian collusion investigation. “At the time I was really ill-prepared to parse what was going on,” he told Rogan.
“I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this decider of what is true in the world,” Zuckerberg continued. “So we tried to put in place a system that would deal with it and early on tried to make it (censorship) really limited.” Then he explained how Meta chose to use third-party fact checkers.
However, the fact-checkers started doing more than they were intended to do, and Zuckerberg compared their censorship to “something out of 1984 where it really is a slippery slope.”
The Biden administration pushed Meta to remove content saying vaccines had side effects
When COVID-19 first broke out, “it was a legitimate public health crisis,” Zuckerberg explained. He justified immediate censorship on Meta, saying, “The Supreme Court has this clear precedence: your ability to speak can be temporarily curtailed to get an emergency under control, so I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID-19.”
However, the vaccine program the Biden administration rolled out posed new problems for Zuckerberg. “While they were pushing out that program, they were also trying to censor anyone who was against it,” he said.
“They pushed us super hard to take down things that were true,” Zuckerberg added, including content that said the vaccine had side effects.
The Biden administration would ‘scream’ and ‘curse’ at Meta employees
In an attempt to get Meta to censor posts containing unfavorable information about the new vaccine, Zuckerberg said, “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse.”
The tech CEO mentioned one specific instance when the Biden administration asked them to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, “talking about how in 10 years from now or something you’re going to see an ad that says if you took a COVID-19 vaccine, you’re eligible for this kind of payment.”
Zuckerberg said initially they resisted censorship, but at some point, things flipped. He explained that Biden gave a press conference “where he was like, ‘These guys (Meta) are killing people.’ And then, I don’t know, all these different agencies of government started investigating and coming after our company.”
Federal government organizations unrelated to social media began looking into the company.
“When you think about it, the U.S. government should be defending its companies, not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg explains censorship issues and changes, adds, ‘X did it better than us’
Compared to Meta’s original use of third-party fact checkers, Zuckerberg said, “I think what Twitter/X has done with community notes is a downright better program,” explaining how community notes allows users to see more information, not less.
However, Zuckerberg believes the trickiest censorship issue Meta has is where to set the classifiers.
If a bot scanning for terrorism-related content is programmed to flag posts with a 90% probability of being terrorism related, there is a 1 in 10 chance that something will be flagged that is completely unrelated.
In an attempt to unjustly ban fewer users, Meta will increase the threshold needed to censor the content.
“It’s going to mean that we’re going to take down a smaller amount of the harmful content, but it will also mean that we will dramatically reduce the amount of people whose accounts we were taking off for a mistake,” Zuckerberg said.
Pete Hegseth would have been censored for ‘hate speech’ on former censorship plan
“Pete Hegseth is probably going to be defending his nomination for Secretary of Defense on the Senate floor, and one of the points he’s made is that he thinks women shouldn’t be able to be in certain combat roles,” Zuckerberg said.
He continued, “Until we updated our policies, that wouldn’t have been a thing you could have said on our platforms because it calls for the exclusion of a particular category of people.”
Zuckerberg explained how on its face, that categorization seems fine, but “if you’re able to say it on the Senate floor, you should probably be able to say it on social media.”
Zuckerberg also praised work Musk and Jim Jordan have done to increase free speech online. “I think what Elon did with the Twitter files, I think Jim Jordan did that for the rest of the industry with the congressional investigation that he did,” Zuckerberg said.