Zuckerberg spoke about censorship in the U.S. in an interview with conservative podcaster Rogan

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, CEO of Meta (recognized as extremist and banned in Russia), Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the censorship that thrives in the United States. A recording of the interview was published on Friday, January 10, on Rogan's YouTube channel PowerfulJRE.

"It was in the last 10 years that people started pushing censorship for ideological reasons. Two major events kicked it off: in 2016 was the election of President [Donald] Trump, which also coincided with Brexit in the EU and the fragmentation of the EU, and then in 2020 was COVID. Those were the two events where for the first time we faced massive institutional pressure to start censoring content for ideological reasons," Zuckerberg said.

According to him, members of the administration of current US President Joe Biden contacted the management of social networks Facebook and Instagram (owned by Meta, a company recognized as extremist and banned in Russia) and demanded the removal of publications that talked about possible side effects of coronavirus vaccines. The House of Representatives conducted an investigation, with significant input from Republican politician Jim Jordan.

"It's something out of the book '1984' - one of those books where it's really a slippery slope. It got to the point where I just realized it was destroying the credibility of this system, especially in the United States. It took a few years before I really came to the conclusion that we needed to make a change," Zuckerberg shared.

He also said that the Biden administration has been using a network of fake accounts through which it tries to influence public opinion. However, artificial intelligence (AI) is now fighting the fake pages.

Zuckerberg voiced hope that the fight against government censorship will be more successful when UFC founder Dana White joins Meta's board of directors.

The CEO named WhatsApp and Signal as the safest messengers. However, he noted that law enforcement agencies sometimes manage to read personal correspondence in WhatsApp. Zuckerberg also commented on the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and noted that there are "questions" about his persecution.

Earlier, on January 7, Zuckerberg said that Meta was ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech on its platforms. In addition, he said the company intends to remove various restrictions on a number of topics.

Prior to this, on August 27, 2024, Zuckerberg admitted that the US government had pressured the corporation to censor content on the organization's social networks. He specified that the censorship affected posts on the topic of the coronavirus and content probably related to the involvement of the son of the current American leader Joe Biden Hunter in crimes.

Before that, on August 23, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that Western countries, using leverage on their media, do not just put all events in a favorable light for themselves, but construct their own reality.

On August 17, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said that the White House has ceased to fear for its reputation and now does not shy away from total censorship, adhering to double standards in the issue of freedom of speech. This is how the diplomat commented on the searches in the house of American political scientist and Channel One anchor Dmitry Symes.

Back in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson that the United States controls almost all major Western media outlets, and against this backdrop, American propaganda is very hard to defeat.