President Joe Biden condemned Meta’s decision to fire its U.S. fact-checkers on Friday, hours after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration of demanding the social media company pull down certain content.
Zuckerberg’s announced a plan to move away from fact-checkers on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram earlier this week, axing the post-2016 election guardrails in favor of community notes. Speaking to reporters on Friday, Biden called the move “completely contrary to everything America’s about.”
“Telling the truth matters… You think it doesn’t matter that they let things be printed where millions of people read things that are simply not true?” Biden said. “We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation, but we want to tell the truth.”
Biden labeled the decision “really shameful” and questioned the influence billionaires had over the media ecosystem, changing policies on a whim.
The decision to pull independent fact-checking, seemingly a move to appease President-elect Donald Trump, came alongside a grip of other staffing and policy changes at Meta that moved the platform further into alignment with the MAGA agenda.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg countered that the Biden administration had taken too heavy a hand in their push for accuracy on social media.
The Meta CEO claimed that Biden staffers tried to sway the platform to “censor anyone who was arguing against” the COVID-19 vaccine.
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg told the noted vaccine skeptic. “It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’”
Zuckerberg said Meta’s fact checks had become “something out of ‘1984,’” and added that following Trump’s first election he “deferred too much to the critiques of the media on what we should do.”
In spite of all that, Zuckerberg bristled at the suggestion that he was changing content policies in response to the recent election of Trump.
“I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing because they, kind of, look at the timing and they’re like, ‘Hey, well you’re doing this right after the election,’” Zuckerberg said. “This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while.
