CNN anchor Jim Acosta expressed support on Monday for President Joe Biden’s administration’s efforts to pressure tech giant Meta into censoring content.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Friday that Biden administration officials would “scream” and “curse” at his company’s employees to remove posts, including “true” and humorous content. Acosta, on “CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta,” defended the administration’s actions, suggesting that the White House was justified in trying to influence Meta to remove what he described as “garbage” from its platforms.
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“He’s complaining about the Biden administration, you know, yelling at them to say, you know, get some of this COVID misinformation off of their platforms,” Acosta said. “I mean, isn’t that — that’s sort of what the White House should be doing, right? I mean, tell folks to get this garbage off these platforms if you can, as best as you can.”
The Biden administration had pressured Facebook to censor content about COVID-19 that it considered to be misinformation, according to documents published by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan in July 2023. Facebook executives also felt they were engaged in a “knife fight” with Biden’s White House over COVID-19 censorship, according to a House Judiciary Committee report published in May.
“Basically, it just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not going to — we’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous,’” Zuckerberg told Rogan on Friday. “They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how ten years from now or something, you’re going to see an ad that says, ‘Okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible, like for this kind of payment,’ like this sort of like class-action lawsuit-type meme. And they’re like, ‘No, you have to take that down.’”
“We just said, ‘No, we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are true.’ And then at some point, I guess — I don’t know — it flipped a bit,” he added. “I mean, Biden, when he was — he gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference or to some journalist, where he basically was like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know. Then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”
Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” in July 2021 for not suppressing alleged COVID-19 misinformation.
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