Facebook and Instagram CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Biden administration officials angrily pressured his companies to censor information regarding COVID-19 vaccine side effects during the pandemic.

“While they were trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said in a Friday appearance with podcaster Joe Rogan. “They pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true.”

Zuckerberg said he believes the COVID-19 vaccines “are more positive than negative” but that he regrets censoring information about the vaccines, including side effects, that ended up being proven correct.

The social media head said that Biden administration officials pushed the platforms to take down “anything that says that vaccines might have side effects.”

When Rogan asked Zuckerberg who exactly in the Biden administration pressured him to censor vaccine-related content, the CEO said he “wasn’t involved in those conversations directly.” 

Zuckerberg said Biden administration officials would call Meta employees and “scream at them and curse.”

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be shifting its fact-checking system toward a model more similar to Elon Musk’s community system on X in an effort to depoliticize the content review process. 

Zuckerberg told Rogan that the new policy change at Meta would not affect how the company monitors for terrorist activity, child exploitation, or other content that promotes violence, but he emphasized that the “two most politicized areas of content” are so-called misinformation and hate speech. 

The Meta CEO said the concept of misinformation has been highly controversial “because who gets to judge what’s false and what’s true? You may just not like my opinion on something and then people think it’s false.” 

In August, Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that officials in the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for several months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire” and that officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company did not comply.

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The social media guru wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) over the summer that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information,” his company would not have made the same decisions that it did during the height of the pandemic. 

“We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote to Congress in August.