Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Thursday on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that the FBI approached the social media company during the 2020 presidential election and pushed them to crack down on alleged “Russian propaganda” before the Hunter Biden laptop story was published by the New York Post.
Zuckerberg made the remarks when asked by host Joe Rogan how Facebook handled big news items that were controversial, like 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 on the platform meant that the story was ranked lower in people’s newsfeeds “so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”
Zuckerberg said that the down-ranking of the story had a “meaningful” impact in 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.”
Zuckerberg couldn’t recall the exact details of what the FBI said or if it was in reference to that specific story, but he said that it “basically fit the pattern.”
WATCH:
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