(LifeSiteNews) — Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook censored information about COVID-19 that turned out to be true.
In an interview with the popular podcaster Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg said that during the early days of the COVID scare, “there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions.”
“And, you know, 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, you know, more debatable or true.”
“That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust,” the tech mogul said. “And so I do think that the questions around how to manage that are very nuanced.”
Zuckerberg went on to say that he is generally in favor of only censoring “harms” that “everyone agrees are bad,” like “inciting violence,” terrorism, and sexual exploitation of children.
The Meta CEO said that “I think that you want to reserve the kind of censorship of content to things that are of known categories that people generally agree are bad,” while flagging information that could allegedly be “misinformation” with a “fact check” instead of censoring it outright.
Zuckerberg’s statements stand in stark contrast to the actions that his social media companies have taken in the past. Meta-owned Instagram has been accused of being too lenient in dealing with child exploitation on its platform, and researchers found that the social network is facilitating a “vast pedophile network” through its algorithms.
On the other hand, Facebook has permanently banned LifeSiteNews and other sites for allegedly spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19, even though much of that information, as Zuckerberg admits, turned out to be true or at least debatable.
READ: Top pro-abortion, pro-LGBT orgs take credit for Facebook’s permanent ban of LifeSiteNews
Fridman pointed out that the dangers of both the COVID virus and the COVID shots have been hotly debated and that there is “deep disagreement” about this and other topics.
“So, how do you make decisions about that where half the country in the United States or some large fraction of the world has very different views from another part of the world?” Fridman asked Zuckerberg. “Is there a way for Meta to stay out of the moderation of this?”
Zuckerberg gave a very vague and evasive answer, saying that “I think it’s really hard to know where to draw the line on what is fact and what is opinion because the nature of science is that nothing is ever 100% known for certain.”
“You can disprove certain things, but you’re constantly testing new hypotheses and scrutinizing frameworks that have been long-held and every once in a while you throw out something that was working for a very long period of time and it’s very difficult.”
“But I think that just because it’s very hard and just because they’re edge cases doesn’t mean that you should not try to give people what they’re looking for as well,” he continued.
Once again, Zuckerberg’s words appear to be at odds with the actions his platforms have taken in censoring voices that dissent from mainstream scientific orthodoxy, even though he admits that even widely accepted scientific hypotheses and frameworks can change.
Citing the Twitter Files, which have revealed collusion between various government agencies and Twitter, Fridman asked Zuckerberg, “what’s Meta’s approach to resist the pressure from governments and other interest groups in terms of what to moderate and [what] not?”
The Meta CEO claimed that “in general, we’re pretty active in kind of advocating and pushing back on requests to take things down.”
He also explained how government agencies like the CIA and FBI share information with Meta. “It’s not really pressure [to censor content] as much as it is just, you know, flagging something that our security systems should be on alert about.”
While intelligence agencies may not directly pressure social media platforms to censor content, pointing them to certain “threats” can be an effective way to achieve a political goal as well, as the case of the suppression of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 has shown. The Twitter Files revealed that the FBI “repeatedly primed [Twitter executive] Yoel Roth” for months “to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” without directly threatening or pressuring Roth or Twitter, even though the FBI knew that the laptop was authentic.
READ: 6 bombshell facts from Elon Musk’s Twitter Files you need to know
“There are a lot of people who think we should be censoring more content, there are a lot of people who think we should be censoring less content,” Zuckerberg told Fridman.
“So it gets back to the question of truth because, for a lot of these things, they haven’t yet been hardened into a single truth, and society’s sort of trying to hash out what we think on certain issues,” he continued. “Maybe in a few hundred years, everyone will look back and say, ‘Hey, no, it wasn’t obvious that it should have been this,’ but, you know, we’re kind of in that meat grinder now, and working through that.”
Zuckerberg seems to suffer from cognitive dissonance, as he admits that there are complex issues that need to be discussed and are not settled yet. However, his social media companies, especially Facebook and Instagram, have repeatedly censored conservative users and organizations like LifeSiteNews that have expressed views and provided evidence that goes against the mainstream narrative on COVID, “LGBT,” and other hotly debated issues, therefore preventing these discussions from happening on his platforms.