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Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed recently that the scientific "establishment" asked his platform to "censor" posts about COVID-19 that ended up being "debatable or true."
In his comments during Thursday's episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," Zuckerberg discussed the "issues and challenges" of executing his platform's policies on removing "misinformation."
He said it can be "really tricky" when some content is false, "but may not be harmful, so it's like, alright, are you going to censor someone for just being wrong, if there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing?’"
As an example, Zuckerberg said, "Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions, and, unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts."
During a recent podcast, Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that scientific experts often pushed him to censor Facebook posts about COVID-19 that ended up being true. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Zuckerberg noted the "establishment" encouraged him to enforce these shaky facts, saying they "asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true."
He admitted to Fridman that he believes the requests made to him by the scientific community hurt their credibility with the public. "It really undermines trust," he added.
Fridman prompted Zuckerberg's answer by mentioning his concern that the nuance and depth of information that can be found on the internet and currently in AI systems could be "lost" thanks to content moderation pushed by governments and institutions. "It's a scary thought," the host stated.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing misinformation about the virus.
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Zuckerberg has been accused of working with former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci to cover up Facebook posts alleging that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan, China lab. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
At the time Zuckerberg claimed, "If we see harmful misinformation on the platform, then we take it down. It's against our policy." However, he also admitted his system for combating misinformation wasn’t perfect.
He told King, "But do we catch everything? Of course, there are mistakes that we make or areas where we need to improve. But that's the best number that we have in terms of what we've seen and what our systems have been able to detect."
Last year, several state Attorneys General compiled evidence alleging that Zuckerberg coordinated with former National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Fauci to "discredit and suppress" the theory that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a Wuhan lab.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once claimed Facebook had suppressed 18 million posts that contained "misinformation" about COVID-19. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Energy concluded earlier this year that the pandemic most likely did leak from the Wuhan lab in China.