Inside The Bizarre Drama Between Mark Zuckerberg And Joe Biden

One of the richest men in the world, Mark Zuckerberg has faced his fair share of controversy as the leader of the social media giant, Facebook. One of those controversies came in 2024, as he kicked off the year in a senate hearing, apologizing to parents for what they'd endured after their children were exploited on social media. He then doubled down on Facebook's commitment to protecting kids. Zuckerberg's 2025 also began on a controversial note, with the January 7 announcement that Facebook Meta was eliminating its third party fact-checking program. That's when President Joe Biden entered the chat.

In remarks to the press on January 10, Biden addressed Facebook's decision to move away from verifying the validity of content posted in favor of Community Notes, similar to what Elon Musk did with X (formerly Twitter). "It's just completely contrary to everything America's about," he said, via NBC News. "We want to tell the truth. We haven't always done it as a nation, but we want to tell the truth."

Just days after Biden's comments, Zuckerberg went on the defensive with an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. Zuckerberg claimed that the Biden administration contacted his team during the height of the Covid-19 outbreak and demanded that certain posts be removed. "It just got to this point where we were like 'no, we're not going to take down things that are true, that's ridiculous.'"

The war of words between Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Joe Biden, who bid farewell to the nation as the 46th Commander in Chief, escalated in January of 2025 thanks to Facebook's decision to eliminate third party fact-checking. But that wasn't the first time that Zuckerberg and Biden butted heads.

During the Covid-19 outbreak in 2021, Biden slammed Facebook for allowing misinformation about the vaccine to be posted. "They're killing people," Biden said via CNN, "look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people." Facebook pushed back on Biden's comments, claiming that over 2 billion people had used the platform to get factual information. Biden later clarified his statement, telling CNN that he meant to blame Facebook for not properly handling the misinformation, which was ultimately killing people.

In an August 26 letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that Biden's administration tried to censor Facebook in 2021 by pressuring the platform to remove vaccine-related posts. "I believe the government pressure was wrong," Zuckerberg wrote, via Reuters, "and I regret we were not more outspoken about it." During the interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg claimed that Biden's staff would scream and curse at his team over the phone in an effort to convince them to take down posts.