PoliticsLeonardo DiCaprio Meme at Center of COVID Censorship Crisis as Mark Zuckerberg Claims Biden Administration Yelled at Meta Team to Take It Down
Mark Zuckerberg claimed he got yelled at over a meme.
Mark Zuckerberg claimed President Joe Biden's team yelled at him to censor a Leonardo DiCaprio meme about the COVID-19 pandemic.
During a surprise appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, the head of Meta revealed the White House would "call up our team and scream at them and curse" over various social media memes.
Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance on 'The Joe Rogan Experience.'
"Basically, it just got to this point where we were like, no, we're not going to take down things that are true," Zuckerberg told Rogan. "That's ridiculous."
The Facebook billionaire described a specific meme of DiCaprio pointing at a TV from the Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which 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."
After the Biden administration asked Facebook to take down the meme, Zuckerberg claimed he and his team said: "No, we're not going to take down humor."
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."
The face of Meta's appearance on the podcast comes after recent attempts to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration, including dramatically axing the tech company's team of fact-checkers.
Axios also revealed the company terminated all of its DEI programs effective immediately.
- Donald Trump Temporarily Locked Out Of Twitter For Sharing Columnist's Email
- 'I Did Not Participate In This Decision': Parler CEO John Matze Fired By Board Of Directors
- Kamala Harris Fans Joke She's '100 Percent Over' Joe Biden After He Makes Awkward Fire Pun During L.A. Briefing: 'Her Face Says It All'
Want OK! each day? Sign up here!
Mark Zuckerberg is trying to mend ties with the incoming Donald Trump administration.
Zuckerberg said a turning point for his approach to censorship under Biden came when the president publicly stated social media memes combatting his pandemic narrative were "killing people."
He told Rogan: "All these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company ... It was brutal, brutal."
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," he added. "Did you record any of those phone calls? God, I want to listen."
Joe Rogan's podcast generates millions of views on YouTube and Spotify.
The interview quickly racked up over half a billion views in just two hours on YouTube. Some of Rogan's interviews have reached as high as 62 million views, including a 2-month-old episode with Donald Trump currently sitting as "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast's second-most-watched podcast on the platform.
