On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that the FBI had approached his company ahead of the 2020 presidential election and pushed them to crack down on “Russia propaganda” just before the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Zuckerberg made the comments in response to host Joe Rogan asking about how Facebook handled controversial news stories, specifically asking about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was, we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg said.
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said, ‘You can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that,” Zuckerberg continued. “What we do is we have, if something was reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also use third-party fact-checking program, because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false. And for the — I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it; you could still consume it.”
Zuckerberg said that the reduced distribution meant that the story was ranked lower in people’s newsfeeds “so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.” Zuckerberg added that the suppression of the story had a “meaningful” impact on how many people saw it.
“So depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor it enough or censored it way too much,” he continued. “But we weren’t sort of as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s like very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
— Minds???? (@minds) August 25, 2022
In response to Zuckerberg’s admission, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised to hold Democrats, the FBI and Big Tech accountable when “Republicans are back in charge.”
“The FBI colluded with Big Tech to silence news stories weeks before the 2020 election in an attempt to control your access to information. Democrats in Congress have been intentionally ignoring the facts. When Republicans are back in charge, we will hold all of them accountable,” McCarthy said.
