Zuckerberg says Biden admin people used to call Meta, curse and scream; working with third-party fact-checkers was like 1984

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened up for the first time after shutting down the third-party fact-checking program and said that it felt like "something out of like 1984", the book, a slippery slope. Appearing on the

Joe Rogan podcast

, Zuckerberg blamed the Joe Biden administration for pressuring them to "censor true information" on their platforms.
"These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse and it's like these documents are all kind of there," Zuckerberg said. Joe Rogan sighed and asked whether he had any records of those calls. Zuckerberg said there are emails which are all published. The Meta CEO said it reached a point where they refused to take down things from their platform which were true. "They wanted us to take down this meme on Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV..." Zuckerberg said adding that Meta refused to take down memes, satire and things which were true. Biden also gave a statement saying that 'these guys (Meta) are killing people' and after that, all sorts of agencies started coming after Meta, Zuckerberg said.

On ending third-party fact-checking

Zuckerberg said he had been thinking about ending third-party fact-checking for quite some time. The 2020 election and the Covid changed a lot about how people trust the media, Zuckerberg said acknowledging that people now get information from his platforms and other social media platforms. On the timing of his announcement which came just ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration, he said there was no good time for it and that he now has a much greater hold on policies.

Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checking veered from what the original intent was. "Early on, we made it really limited; we said, ‘All right, we're just going to have a system where third-party fact-checkers handle the worst of the worst stuff.’ Things that are very clear hoaxes—like "the Earth is flat"—not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or slightly false; that was the original intent."
"We put the system in place, but it just veered from there; we kept trying to get it back to what we originally intended, which wasn’t about judging people’s opinions; it was meant to fact-check the most extreme claims."
Zuckerberg said people felt that fact-checkers are too biased. Going through the entire experience was like 1984, the book, a slippery slope, the Meta CEO said adding that this program was destroying so much trust, especially in the United States.