‘I Was Ill-Prepared’: Zuckerberg Blames Anti-Trump Media For Facebook Fact-Checking Measures in Marathon Joe Rogan Interview

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed he was “ill-prepared” to face anti-Trump media pressuring him to fact-check misinformation on social media.

During a nearly three-hour-long podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg said he received pressure over the last decade to start censoring material on Facebook based on political ideology. He cited Trump’s 2016 victory and BREXIT for the increase in political censorship.

Recently, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be scrapping fact-checking in the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms. The billionaire tech CEO claimed the decision would “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”

The Meta founder seemed to lay criticism regarding the platform’s handling of misinformation on outsiders, arguing he was “ill-prepared” to deal with pressure from “folks in the media.”

ZUCKERBERG: It was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for like ideological based censorship. And I think it was two main events that really triggered this in 2016 there was the election of President Trump also coincided with basically BREXIT in the EU. And sort of the fragmentation of the EU and then you know in 2020 there was covid and I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time we just face this massive massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds.

ROGAN: I’m sorry to interrupt you but when it first came up in 2016 did it come under the guise of the Russian collusion hoax?

ZUCKERBERG: Yeah and this is the thing I at the time I was really sort of ill prepared to kind of parse what was going on. You know I think part of my reflection looking back on this is I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying okay there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation. People can’t actually believe this stuff right? It has to be that there’s this kind of like massive misinformation out there um some of it started with the the Russia collusions stuff but it kind of morphed into different things over time.

Watch the clip above via The Joe Rogan Experience.