Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reflected on the company’s role in censoring information during the COVID-19 pandemic on Thursday’s episode of The Rex Fridman Podcast. .

Zuckerberg suggested that censoring misinformation is difficult and requires a degree of subjective judgment. Enforcing censorship around the coronavirus pandemic has been particularly difficult, the tech mogul continued. Many scientific assumptions were not properly scrutinized at the time. Zuckerberg also told Fridman that the “establishment” wanted censorship of claims ultimately determined to be controversial or correct.

“So misinformation is really nasty, because some things are clearly false, some things may be true but not harmful,” he began. “So you’re going to censor someone just because they’re wrong when their actions don’t involve any harm? I think…there are a lot of real problems and challenges out there. is.” (Related: Adam Schiff asks Amazon and Facebook to ban content promoting ‘vaccine misinformation’)

“Let’s take some information about the novel coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic, where there were real health effects, but we didn’t have time to fully scrutinize the set of scientific assumptions. And unfortunately , I think a lot of the preconceived notions are correct.” Confused about a set of facts and asked to censor many things that in hindsight turned out to be debatable or true. And that’s really hard, right? It really undermines trust,” Zuckerberg added.

Mark Zuckerberg says censoring coronavirus misinformation has been difficult because scientific authority is often wrong and ultimately undermines public trust.

“Let’s take a look at some of the information about the novel coronavirus where true health existed early in the pandemic… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE

— KanakoaTheGreat (@KanakoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023

In August 2021, Zuckerberg claimed to have deleted 18 million Facebook posts that allegedly contained “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic, but those posts were published elsewhere. CBS News said it did not disclose how often it was viewed or shared on . report at the time.

Facebook announced in mid-July 2021 that more than 2 billion people had viewed “authoritative information” about the novel coronavirus on its platform, according to CBS.Facebook used to be censored Before the ban ended in May 2021, there were posts claiming the pandemic was man-made, also known as the “lab leak theory.”

The emails, obtained by Reason, indicate that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is in regular contact with Facebook, and that staff at the social media platform have been communicating with the agency regarding its COVID-19 control and fact-checking policies throughout 2021. This indicates that instructions were received from

The U.S. Department of Energy concluded in February that the COVID-19 pandemic likely stemmed from a leak in a Chinese lab, according to a report shared with the White House and some members of Congress. .