Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that the social media platform Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for a week.
Mr Zuckerberg disclosed this on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast in reply to a question about how Facebook handles controversial issues.
Mr Zuckerberg said this was carried out in line with a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to curb election misinformation.
“I mean, the background here is the FBI basically came to us…some folks on our team. They were like, Hey, just so you know…you should be on high alert,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice. That’s basically…there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
Mr Zuckerberg looped Twitter into the discussion, comparing Facebook’s decision to censor the story by decreasing its reach to Twitter for completely hiding it.
“So our protocol’s different from Twitter. What Twitter did is…they said… you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that. What we did was…if something is reported to us as potential misinformation…important misinformation, we also run third-party fact-checking programmes because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false,” he explained. “I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution of Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”
In 2020, The New York Post exposed the existence of thousands of emails between President Joe Biden’s son and business associates from Ukraine. The expose claimed that the emails revealed how Mr Biden’s son used political access in his overseas business dealings.
The paper reported that over 50 former senior intelligence officials signed on to a letter that claimed the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr Biden’s campaign, was quoted as saying by Reuters, rejecting the news.
In response, Twitter prohibited its users from posting links to the Post story, while Facebook reduced how often the story showed up in users’ news feeds and elsewhere on the Facebook platform.
