When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke with Joe Rogan, he emphasized the threat of state censorship and asked why the melody was being changed.
On” The Joe Rogan Experience,” Zuckerberg claimed,” People in the management calling up the guys on our group, and yelling at them, cursing, and menacing repercussions if we don’t get down things that are genuine. It’s very terrible, it sounds illegal.” ” I was just like also, we’re not going to accomplish that”.
Technically speaking, Zuckerberg is correct that his business did not merely “take down” items that were true. But, according to the Facebook Files, when the President Joe Biden’s administration demanded the company remove” true information about side effects” of vaccines, the company admitted it” currently label]ed ] all of this content and demote]d ] some of it” . ,
The business has just done away with its point checking system, promising “more talk and fewer mistakes” — and Zuckerberg cast the company as standing for “free expression” while speaking to Rogan. However, if Zuckerberg and Facebook were so vehemently opposed to federal censorship, one might wonder why they were initially prepared to delete content for the Biden regime.
Speech Protection
Plaintiffs filed lawsuits against federal officials and organizations in Murthy v. Missouri because they were concerned about the Biden White House and Facebook-style government-tech censoring arrangement. A majority of Supreme Court justices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, ruled in favor of plaintiffs, finding that they “failed to demonstrate a large chance that, in the near future, they may suffer an injury that is detectable to a Government accused and redressable by the order.”
If the Twitter Files weren’t enough to show this bad, one needs look solely at Zuckerberg’s new attendance that Facebook went along with the Biden administration’s ideas at earliest.  ,
Zuckerberg said,” At the beginning, it kind of seemed like we should give the government and the health authorities a little respect on how we should enjoy this,”” OK, we should give a little respect,'”  ,
Obviously, Zuckerberg only takes meetings with Biden White House officials to be” a little bit of devotion” when it comes to shaping the Covid tale. Although biden’s intentions were well known, files released by the House Judiciary Committee make it clear that Facebook was well aware of this, Zuckerberg attempted to refute Zuckerberg’s claim that the situation had really gotten out of hand.
” Everyone was shifting about, it just became extremely hard to kind of follow, and this really strike the most serious I’d state during the Biden Administration”, he said.  ,
He depicted the business battling government overreach in a photograph.  ,
” Practically all these different agencies and branches of government just started looking into and pursuing our business. Never mind that Facebook was assisting the government in defusing social rebels and already had its own censorship laws in place, Zuckerberg claimed.” It was brutal,” he continued.  ,
In reality, Zuckerberg admitted in the discussion that Pete Hegseth — Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense — may have faced repression under the company’s old requirements.
” Pete Hegseth is likely going to be defending his candidacy for Secretary of Defense on the Senate ground, and I think one of the points he’s made is that he believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to be in some conflict jobs,” Zuckerberg said. That wouldn’t have been something you could have said on our platforms if we hadn’t updated our policies because it would call for the exclusion of a protected category of people.
A Change Of Heart?
Despite when The Federalist previously reached out, a company spokesperson declined to respond to any inquiries about this on the record. Meta has since adopted a new set of standards that it claims will make it easier for users to post content on the company’s platforms.  ,
Given its previous censorship and policies, Zuckerberg claims the business has always been concerned about free speech. However, this seems unlikely given its history as a government censorship branch. Metadata also relied on “international human rights norms” above the First Amendment, as The Federalist reported last year, so it hardly has any stance on the right to free speech as guaranteed by the constitution. This raises the question: Why the change of heart?
When the government pushed censorship that” sounds illegal,” Zuckerberg claimed that he knew the company might be held accountable if it went this far.  ,  ,
He claimed that” the First Amendment does apply to the government” but not to businesses in our content editing, so he must have known that if a company agreed to censor true content, it would be engaging in potentially illegal activity.  , It seems, then, the company’s refusal to censor true content may have been a self-serving attempt to escape liability.
After all, Zuckerberg has made a radical change since former president Donald Trump won reelection and promised to hold people accountable. He has since rebranded himself as a young person who supports free speech, a far cry from the billionaire who supported Biden’s victory in office and censored anti-vaccine speech in 2020.
” A lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, it’s because they kind of look at the timing, and they’re like’ Hey, you’re doing this right after the election,'” Zuckerberg said to Rogan. ” It’s like, okay, I try not to change our content rules right in the middle of an election”.
Never mind that Zuckerberg dumped$ 350 million into local election offices in 2020 to help leftist nonprofits change election laws. Additionally, his company directly censored The Federalist at least 11 times, not to mention a number of other conservative organizations.  ,
He abruptly told Rogan that he believes Trump” just wants America to win” and that he wants to encourage free speech. However, Meta continues to respond to requests for user data from governments around the world and places content restrictions at their request.  ,
Zuckerberg should publish every request from the White House or other federal officials to censor users since the Facebook Files of 2021 to ensure Americans Meta is no longer colluding with government bureaucrats to silence speech. Congress’s investigators must make sure that the White House and other unelected bureaucrats aren’t continuing to cooperate with Meta or other Big Tech companies to silence online speech.  ,
Logan Washburn is a staff writer who writes about the integrity of elections. He is a The College Fix spring 2025 fellow. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon, but he now resides in rural Michigan.
