Joe Rogan picked up the phone, or more likely opened an app, and told Mark Zuckerberg something was wrong. In 2023, the podcaster reached out directly to the Meta chief executive with a complaint: posts on an Instagram account tied to The Joe Rogan Experience kept getting flagged and pulled down. That exchange, described in an email Zuckerberg himself wrote, surfaced this week in a New Mexico courtroom, and it did more than confirm that Rogan asked for help. It showed Zuckerberg personally stepping in to get Rogan’s accounts added to a program that exempts certain users from Meta’s standard content enforcement.
The disclosure came out of a video deposition the New Mexico Department of Justice played for a Santa Fe jury on September 9 and 10, running close to two hours. The underlying case dates back to 2021, when then-Attorney General Hector Balderas sued Facebook over claims the company misrepresented how it handled user data, allegations rooted in the Cambridge Analytica breach. But New Mexico attorney Randi McGinn used her time with Zuckerberg to go well beyond that, pressing him on content moderation, misinformation and whether Facebook quietly ran a two-tiered system for its most prominent users.
McGinn put it to him directly:
“Despite your promise to treat politicians the same as ordinary users, Facebook created something known as a ‘whitelist,’ which shielded politicians from being fact-checked, didn’t it?”
Zuckerberg’s response leaned on distance rather than denial.
“I’m not familiar with the whole list, so I would certainly believe there were people on the list who were business partners” with Facebook, he said. “But I also can’t name any off the top of my head.”
Whatever the gaps in his memory, McGinn had the paperwork. She introduced Facebook’s 2020 cross-check list, which at the time held more than 4,500 accounts and groups, among them the Proud Boys and Alex Jones. A separate Meta document put before the jury showed that by 2025, the U.S. version of that same list had ballooned to 799,000 people and groups, Rogan’s accounts reportedly among the additions Zuckerberg pushed through himself.
Zuckerberg described the system in far gentler terms than the exhibits suggested according to Abq Journal.
“I think (the cross-check list) was focused on sensitive accounts where we were worried about making mistakes on review, so wanted to make sure that we looked at them twice,”
he testified. He insisted the underlying rules never bent for anyone on it:
“the rules and policies are exactly the same for the people on the cross-check list as they are for people who aren’t.”
He also pointed to a less cynical rationale for its existence, noting the roster included:
“people like human rights activists and journalists and people who might have enemies who are trying to flag their content or get it taken down.”
McGinn pushed back with a concrete example. In July 2020, Breitbart News Network posted a video containing medical misinformation. Because Breitbart sat on the cross-check list, McGinn said, the video racked up 40 million views before anyone completed a review. Zuckerberg questioned what that figure actually proved.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that those people watched the whole broadcast,”
he said.
“It would have showed up, and at least 40 million people would have scrolled by it in a feed.”
The Rogan connection lands against a backdrop the jury didn’t need explained. Zuckerberg has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience twice in recent years, including a lengthy sit-down in 2022 where he addressed Facebook and Twitter’s handling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which the platforms had restricted before reversing themselves amid backlash over censorship. Zuckerberg called getting that call wrong “sucks,” telling Rogan:
“When we take down something that we’re not supposed to, that’s the worst.”
He’s also acknowledged that the White House leaned on Facebook over 2020-era content, part of a broader effort in recent years to smooth over his standing with a conservative audience that has long accused the platform of tilting against it, including praise he later offered Donald Trump.
McGinn’s questioning eventually circled back to the case’s original core: the Cambridge Analytica episode, in which a personality quiz built by an academic researcher harvested data not just from the people who took it but from their Facebook friends as well. That information ultimately reached a political consulting firm that worked for both the Trump and Ted Cruz campaigns. New Mexico’s suit puts the scale at roughly 70 million affected U.S. users, including about 350,000 New Mexico residents.
Zuckerberg’s defense on this point centered on consent mechanics rather than volume.
“You’re missing the most important part, which is that the person had to grant the app developer permission”
to access their data, he said, adding that Facebook’s architecture has shifted dramatically since the app-platform era.
“Before maybe 2012, most of the use of Facebook was on our website. Now it’s in mobile apps,”
he testified, explaining that the open developer platform built for the website never carried over the same way once Apple’s app store rules took hold.
“So, it’s evolved quite a bit over time.”
The trial marks the third time this year that New Mexico and Meta have squared off in a Santa Fe courtroom. In March, a jury ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties over a separate case tied to child safety on its platforms. Then on August 6, District Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay another $567 million to help address harm linked to its products.
This latest proceeding, presided over by Judge Francis Mathew, is expected to run through October 2, with jurors left to weigh Zuckerberg’s account of a system built for caution against McGinn’s portrait of a company that made exceptions for the people it needed most.
