'Someone was trying to get me sentenced to death in Pakistan': Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was sued for blasphemy in Pakistan.

Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that a Pakistani national had attempted to get him sentenced to death for blasphemy over a post that they seemed objectionable. The Meta CEO was speaking at an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast aired last month when he made the revelation.

Zuckerberg was talking about laws in different countries that the tech giant may not necessarily agree with when he used this anecdote as an example. "There was a point at which I think I was someone was trying to get me sentenced to death in Pakistan because they thought that someone on Facebook had a picture of where they had the drawing of the Prophet Muhammad and someone said that 'that's blasphemy in our culture' and they basically like sued me and they open this criminal proceeding," he said. "I don't know exactly where it went because I'm just not planning on going to Pakistan so I was not that worried about it but it was a little bit disconcerting."

The Meta CEO added that while he was not worried about the possibility of his plane being shot down should he ever fly over Pakistan, he felt the incident was avoidable.

Another issue that Zuckerberg said he faces as the head of a tech company is the increase in the number of governments threatening to "throw" executives to prison if they have a problem with their employer. "I think that's just a really weird precedent to set," he said. "We're operating in all these different countries and then like you have all these governments that are basically like if you I know we're going to put on an Interpol notice to get you arrested because you're not doing the thing that we want... I think that's like not great."

Speaking about moderating content on Meta-owned platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, Zuckerberg said the company often faces challenges in regions whose values clash with that company's understanding of freedom of speech.

"There are all these places around the world that just have different values that go against our free expression values and [they] want us to crack down and ban way more stuff than I think you know a lot of people that we would believe is like the right thing to do and to have those governments be able to exert the power of saying okay we're going to throw you in prison is a lot of force I mean," he said, adding that it's one of the things that that the US government is probably going to need to help defend the American tech companies functioning abroad.