Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a podcast published on Friday that his company was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content on side effects of Covid vaccines.

Early in a conversation that lasted about three hours, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he’s generally “pretty pro rolling out vaccines” and that they are “more positive than negative.”

“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said.

A Biden administration representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The remarks come days after Meta said it would stop relying on third parties to check facts published on its widely used applications and instead turn to community notes, letting users add commentary regarding truthfulness. The strategy puts Meta more inline with X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been advising President-elect Donald Trump and was a major backer of his campaign.

It’s also the latest in a string of announcements and comments following Trump’s election that appear targeted at appeasing the incoming president. Last week, Meta replaced its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current policy vice president and a former Republican Party staffer.

Meta was one of several large technology companies to announce that it was contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, NBC News reported.

Zuckerberg has expressed criticism in the past about the Biden administration’s handling of Covid-related content.

In a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said the administration “pressured” Meta to “censor” Covid-19 content, adding that he regretted some of the decisions the company made following those requests.

“And they pushed us super hard, to take down the things that were honestly were true,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”

Zuckerberg didn’t specify who from the White House made the requests, acknowledging that “I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly.” But he said the company’s response was that it wasn’t going to take down content that “is kind of inarguably true.”

The Food and Drug Administration said in 2021 that headache, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea and fever were the most common side effects of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid vaccine. Worldwide, Covid vaccines are credited with saving tens of millions of lives a year when the pandemic was raging.

On a separate matter, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to protect its technology industry, leaving too much power in the hands of regulators abroad. He said the European Union has fined technology companies more than $30 billion over the past 20 years.

“It’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump, is I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.

WATCH: Reed: Is Facebook a news platform or a vehicle for information?

Amazon is shutting down “Prime Try Before You Buy,” a competitor to Stitch Fix that allowed Prime members to try out clothes, shoes and accessories and only pay for items they wanted to keep.

The service will be discontinued on Jan. 31, according to a notice posted to Amazon’s website. The notice then directs users to browse Amazon’s fashion homepage.

Try Before You Buy is the latest example of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s ongoing efforts to rein in costs across the company. Beginning in 2022 and extending throughout 2024, Amazon initiated the largest layoffs in the company’s history, cutting more than 27,000 jobs across the company. It has also shuttered several of its experimental projects, such as a speedy brick-and-mortar delivery service, its telehealth offering and a quirky video-calling device for kids.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the move, which was first reported by The Information.

“Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we’re phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025,” the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

Amazon rolled out the service, which was previously called Prime Wardrobe, in 2017. It was only available to members of Amazon’s $139-per-year Prime subscription program, which also includes perks such as speedy shipping and access to streaming services.

Users could test out a mix of luxury, staple and Amazon-owned brands, and return whatever they didn’t want to keep for free within seven days of receiving the items. The service operated similarly to wardrobe subscription services including Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, as well as newer entrants such as Urban Outfitters‘ Nuuly.

Meta on Friday told employees that its plans to end a number of internal programs designed to increase the company’s hiring of diverse candidates, the latest dramatic change ahead of President-elect Donald Trump‘s second White House term.

Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of people, made the announcement on the company’s Workplace internal communications forum.

Among the changes, Meta is ending the company’s “Diverse Slate Approach” of considering qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for its open roles. The company is also putting an end to its diversity supplier program and its equity and inclusion training programs.

Gale also announced the disbanding of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, team, and she said that Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams will move into a new role focused on accessibility and engagement.

Several Meta employees responded to Gale’s post with comments criticizing the new policy.

“If you don’t stand by your principles when things get difficult, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies,” one employee posted in a comment that got reaction from more than 600 colleagues.

The DEI policy change follows a number of sweeping policy reversals by the social media company this month. Last week, Meta replaced global affairs head Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a veteran at the company with longstanding ties to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new speech policy that included bringing an end to the company’s third-party fact-checking program.

Axios was first to report the DEI changes at the social media company. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Below is Gale’s full internal memo, which CNBC obtained.

Hi all,

I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development, and procurement practices. Before getting into details, there is some important background to lay out:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms long standing principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.

At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we’ve always believed that no one should be given — or deprived — of opportunities because of protective characteristics, and that has not changed.

Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we’re making the following changes:

• On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.

• We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.

• We are sunsetting our supplier diversity effort within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who are part of the supplier diversity program.

• Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.

• We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams is taking on a new role at Meta focused on accessibility and engagement.

What remains the same are the principles we’ve used to guide our People Practices:

1. We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
2. We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics, (e.g., race, gender, etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.
3. We drive consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not provide preferential treatment, extra opportunities or unjustified credit to anyone based on protected characteristics. Nor will we devalue impact based on these characteristics.
4. We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products and those in the communities. We operate our employee community groups (MRGs) continue to be open to all.

Meta has the privilege to serve billions of people every day. It is important to us that our products are accessible to all, and useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.

WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly