Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast released Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content about Covid vaccine side effects.

At the start of a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he was generally “pretty pro-vaccine rollout” and that they were “more positive than negative.”

“But I think that while they’re trying to push this agenda, they’ve also tried to censor anyone who fundamentally argues against it,” Zuckerberg said.

A representative for the Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The remarks come days after Meta said it would no longer rely on third parties to verify facts posted on its widely used applications and would instead rely on community notes to allow users to add comments on veracity. The strategy puts Meta more in line with X, whose owner Elon Musk advised President-elect Donald Trump and was a key supporter of his campaign.

It is also the latest in a series of announcements and comments following Trump’s election that appear aimed at appeasing the new president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current political vice president and former Republican Party staffer.

Meta was one of several major technology companies to announce it would contribute $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News reported.

President Biden addressed Meta’s fact-checking policy change during a press conference on Friday.

“The idea that a billionaire can buy something and, by the way, say that from now on we’re not going to fact-check anything and, you know, when millions of people go online and read this stuff, “That’s it – at least that’s what I think “It’s really shameful,” Biden said.

Zuckerberg has criticized the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content in the past.

In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions that made that happen I met companies based on these inquiries.

“And they pushed us super hard to eliminate the things that were, quite frankly, true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said anything that says vaccines could have side effects you basically have to remove.”

Zuckerberg did not specify who within the White House made the requests, saying, “I was not directly involved in those conversations.” But he said the company’s response was that it would not remove content that “somehow are undeniably true.”

The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that the most common side effects were headache, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea and fever Johnson & Johnson’s Single shot Covid vaccine. Globally, Covid vaccines are credited with saving tens of millions of lives each year as the pandemic raged.

On a separate topic, Zuckerberg said the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to protect its tech industry and has given too much power to regulators abroad. He said the European Union has imposed more than $30 billion in fines against technology companies over the past 20 years.

“I’m bullish on President Trump because I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.

REGARD: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or an information carrier?