Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the Biden administration tried to force him to censor a meme about the Covid-19 pandemic, and responded with a ‘brutal’ retaliation when he refused. 

The Meta chief, 40, said in a surprise appearance on the popular podcast that the White House would ‘call up our team and scream at them and curse’ over social media memes. 

‘Basically, it just got to this point where we were like no, we’re not going to take down things that are true,’ Zuckerberg said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ 

Specifically, the billionaire said Biden wanted him to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, seemingly from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

The meme, he said, poked fun at how ’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’ in ‘sort of like a class action lawsuit type meme.’ 

After being told to take down the meme, Zuckerberg claimed he and his team responded: ‘No we’re not we’re not going to take down humor.’ 

In a stunning claim, Zuckerberg said the White House ‘pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true’, and ‘said anything that says vaccines have side effects, you need to take down.’  

Zuckerberg’s appearance on the podcast comes days after he dramatically axed Meta’s team of fact-checkers in a sudden about-turn, although some in the MAGA movement said they were leery of his recent support for Donald Trump. 

As is typical with Rogan’s podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian made no early announcement of Zuckerberg’s appearance before it was published on Friday afternoon. 

The interview quickly racked up over 200,000 views in under 45 minutes on YouTube- with some of Rogan’s interviews reaching huge audiences such as his 53 million viewer episode with Donald Trump two months ago. 

In Friday’s episode, Zuckerberg said a turning point for his approach to censorship under Biden came when the president publicly said social media memes combatting his pandemic narrative were ‘killing people.’ 

‘All these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company,’ he said. 

‘It was brutal, brutal.’ 

Zuckerberg said the Biden administration would ‘call the guys on our team and yell at them and curse and threaten repercussions’ if they didn’t take information off his platforms, which he argued ‘sounds illegal.’ 

Rogan said the demands were clearly a ‘massive overstepping’ from the federal government, adding: ‘And also, you weren’t killing people.

‘This is the thing with all of this, they suppressed so much information about things that people should be doing, regardless of whether or not you believe in the vaccine.’

‘Did you record any of those phone calls? God, I want to listen,’ he added. 

Rogan, who was an outspoken sceptic of the Covid-19 vaccine, seemed stunned by Zuckerberg’s claims over the ‘brutal’ approach the Biden administration took to censorship during the pandemic. 

The comedian and podcaster argued that one of the most striking aspects was the White House’s suppression of health remedies that would benefit people’s daily lives anyway. 

‘They were suppressing this stuff because they didn’t want people to think that you could get away with not taking the vaccine, which is really crazy’ he argued. 

‘It scared the s*** out of a lot of people.’ 

Zuckerberg recalled that following Donald Trump’s first presidential election victory in 2016, he felt he got swept up in the media mania over the Republican’s surprise victory. 

‘In retrospect I deferred too much to the critique from the media on what we should do,’ he admitted. 

‘And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff.’   

The Meta chief has made string of public statements in recent months over censorship, including a shock admission in August that he was ‘pressured’ by the Biden administration to carry out their demands. 

After publicly donating to Trump’s inauguration fund following November’s election, Zuckerberg surprised many this week as he shared a five-minute video announcing the end of ‘fact checking’ on Meta platforms. 

‘We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,’ he said. 

‘More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.’

Like X, the shift will allow users on the sites to call out posts that are potentially misleading and need more context.

The missive appears to be part of a full court press to change Meta, social media and the internet itself for the second Trump era.