Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (now known as Meta) has criticized the behavior of the medical and scientific establishment during the coronavirus pandemic, who, backed by western governments, demanded social media censorship of information that “ended up being more debatable or true.”
Zuckerberg, who previously laid bare the FBI’s efforts to warn social media companies about “Russian propaganda dumps” shortly before the publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, made these new comments on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
The Facebook CEO said that the medical establishment “often waffled” on COVID claims, and requested the removal of material that ended up being debatable or true.
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions, said Zuckerberg.
“Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust.”
Zuckerberg said his company is still under pressure for more censorship from various forces around the world.
“There are obviously a lot of people who think that we should be censoring more content. Or there are a lot of people who think we should be censoring less content.”
“There’s the media, there’s activist groups… there are groups all over the world, in every country, that bring different values. It’s a very active debate.”
“There are so many people and different forces that are trying to apply pressure from different sides. I don’t think you can make decisions based on trying to make people happy. You just have to do what you think is the right balance and accept that people are going to be upset no matter where you come out on that.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.