Joe Rogan podcast - live: Zuckerberg stirs controversy discussing ‘perfect’ bots, Hunter Biden and Metaverse
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Your support makes all the difference.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who oversees Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the Metaverse, made a surprise appearance as a guest on controversial podcast host Joe Rogan’s latest show.
Mr Zuckerberg’s three-hour interview touched on a variety of subjects as he touted the potential of Metaverse, discussed his favourite hobbies, weighed in on Hunter Biden’s laptop and revealed he doesn’t have time for social media sites despite having founded one of the world’s largest.
A standout moment came when he replied to a question on bot accounts and controversial content on social media platforms, saying he believes there weren’t going to be “perfect” artificial intelligence systems.
“I think it’s all trade-offs all the way down,” he said.
Mr Rogan has been a lightning rod since his Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast, was bought by Spotify in a $100m deal.
Earlier this year Rogan found himself at the centre of controversy when he was accused of spreading Covid-19 misinformation and hosted a guest who claimed that Americans were “hypnotised” into wearing masks and getting vaccines.
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Amanda Whiting has the story.
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Zuckerberg says he can’t spend long time on Twitter ‘without getting too upset’
ICYMI: The Meta CEO made the comment as he sat for a three-hour interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, and compared Twitter to using Instagram.
“I find that it’s hard to spend a lot of time on Twitter without getting too upset,” he said.
“On the flip side, I think Instagram is a super positive space. I think some of the critiques we get there is that it’s very curated and potentially, in some ways, overly positive... It’s easy to spend time there, and kind of absorb a lot of the positivity.”
Zuckerberg added that the design of Instagram was a deliberate one, saying “I don’t want to build something that makes people angry.”
The tech titan explained to Rogan that he thought the differences between the two platforms were because of “the design of the systems.”
“I think images are a little less cutting usually, and kind of critical, than text,” he said.
Zuckerberg says company spends $5bn per year defending against bad actors and nation states
ICYMI: “We call this ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’. We have a team of hundreds of counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence people looking for these signals. Dealing with nation states is harder, they are sovereignty motivated, you have to be vigilant and it is an arms race and you have to develop technology for defence.”
He said that the company spends $5bn a year on “community integrity” work.
Zuckerberg finds Twitter ‘upsetting'
Discussing his own social media use, Zuckerberg told Rogan: “I find that it’s hard to spend a lot of time on Twitter without getting too upset.”
“On the flip side, I think Instagram is a super positive space. I think some of the critiques we get there is that it’s very curated and potentially, in some ways, overly positive... It’s easy to spend time there, and kind of absorb a lot of the positivity.”
Zuckerberg added that the design of Instagram was a deliberate one, saying “I don’t want to build something that makes people angry.”
Rogan teases Zuckerberg about robot memes
Despite saying he doesn’t have time for social media, Zuckerberg confirmed to Rogan that he has seen memes branding him a robot.
The memes stemmed from the Meta CEO’s testimony before Congress in 2021, where viewers noted how stiffly he drank from a glass of water.
“I don’t like the way you sip water though, you sipping water at the Senate, you were sipping water like a robot,” Rogan joked on the three-hour Spotify podcast, and asked Zuckerberg to take a proper drink.
Zuckerberg laughed and took a swig of water from a cup, before defending himself.
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Mark Zuckerberg reacts to memes calling him a robot on The Joe Rogan podcast
‘The Senate testimony is not exactly an environment that is set up to accentuate the humanity of the subject’
Republicans demand Zuckerberg be called to Congress
ICYMI: Republicans are demanding that Zuckerberg be called to Congress to testify over his revelations on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
At the centre of the GOP outrage was the Facebook and Meta founder’s remark that a policy of “decreased distribution” was enacted in connection to a story by the New York Post stemming from Hunter Biden’s laptop in late 2020.
The Independent’s Gustaf Kilander has more:
Republicans demand Zuckerberg be called to Congress over Rogan podcast revelations
‘This isn’t the weird smoking gun lots of people are making it out to be – also, it was Trump’s FBI!’
Zuckerberg weighs in on Hunter Biden’s laptop
Zuckerberg criticised Twitter’s prohibition of sharing a story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter - saying his own social network “took a different path”.
Rogan asked Zuckerberg about the attention Twitter received ahead of the 2020 election for banning the sharing a story by The New York Post about the contents of the future president’s son’s laptop.
“We took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said. The Facebook founder said that the FBI approached Facebook’s team and said that it should be on high alert about Russian propaganda in the election.
The Independent’s Eric Garcia has more:
Zuckerberg takes a swipe at Twitter over handling of Hunter Biden laptop story
‘What Twitter did is they said ‘you can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that,’ the Facebook founder tells Joe Rogan
Conservatives continue to react to to Zuckerberg interview on Rogan
“Are we just going to overlook the fact Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI told Facebook they needed to censor posts during the election,” tweeted Jack Prosbiec.
Joe Rogan and Mark Zuckerberg are basically the same person — that’s the awful truth
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Joe Rogan and Mark Zuckerberg are basically the same person — that’s the dark truth
These two wealthy white men agree that they both deserve power and neither should be held accountable
‘They interfered in the election’, claims Fox News guest
New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor Miranda Devine bashed Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for his admission that the platform took action on the Hunter Biden laptop story after the FBI warned of “Russian propaganda.”
“So Facebook, Twitter, the FBI interfered in the election and they changed the course of history. And for Mark Zuckerberg to sit there with Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan to kind of happily accept what he’s saying with very little pushback is kind of sickening,” she claimed on Fox News on Friday.
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