Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook algorithmically censored the ‘Hunter Biden laptop’ story for a week. He admitted it on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Zuckerberg said he did so following a general request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Zuckerberg revealed details on how Facebook dwelt with “potential misinformation” ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections. “We took a different path than Twitter. I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us they were like, hey, just so you know…you should be high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
The Facebook chief said his team ran a fact-check into the story and then allowed people to share the story, however, the distribution was “decreased”. “Basically the ranking and newsfeed were a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” Zuckerberg revealed.
“We got a lot of complaints…this is a hyper-political issue. So depending on what side of the political spectrum you think we didn’t censor it enough or censored it way too much, we weren’t as black and white about it as Twitter,” the Facebook chief explained.
“So our protocol is 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 programs because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false and…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,” Zuckerberg said.
Republicans accused Facebook of suppressing conservative voices
“We kind of thought, hey, look if the FBI which I view as a legitimate institution in this country…they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” said Zuckerberg.
Reports claimed President Biden’s son Hunter had exchanged hundreds of emails with his business associates in Ukraine and allegedly leveraged political access. However, Biden‘s campaign team during the US election rejected the allegation asserting that it had reviewed “Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”