Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that for a week, Facebook’s algorithm suppressed the article about the “Hunter Biden laptop.”
On the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Zuckerberg acknowledged it. Mark claimed that he took this action in response to an FBI request to limit election-related falsehoods.
Joe questioned Zuckerberg about how Facebook handles controversial issues during the programme, such as the Hunter Biden story, and whether it was censored.
In response, Zuckerberg said, “So we took a different path than Twitter. I mean, basically, 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 high alert. 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.”
While harshly criticising Twitter for completely omitting the article, Mark acknowledged that the story had been censored on Facebook, reducing its exposure.
He said, “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 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.”
He added, “So you can still share it, you could still consume it,” after which Joe interrupted and asked whether the distribution of the story was decreased.
Mark responded by saying, “basically the ranking and newsfeed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”
He later said, “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.”
Republicans charged Facebook for suppressing conservative voices during the debate.
Mark concluded, “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.”
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials reportedly signed a statement that stated that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to the New York Post.
Later, he regretted how Facebook had handled the situation. Is there sorrow for not distributing it fairly and for limiting the spread of that story, Joe queried later? Zuckerberg regretted his actions.
He said, “Yeah, it sucks…it turned out after the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way, that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks.”
Tens of thousands of emails between Biden’s son Hunter and Ukrainian business contacts were made public in 2020 thanks to a New York Post exposé. According to the New York Post’s exposé, the emails showed how Biden’s son used his political connections to advance his international commercial interests.
The New York Post’s story regarding Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter was reportedly rejected by Biden’s presidential campaign, according to the New York Times.
“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 the Biden campaign, was quoted as saying.
Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor for the New York Post, revealed three weeks before the US presidential elections that Twitter was no longer allowing him to post articles that highlight “corruption by a major-party presidential contender, Biden.”
Following Twitter not allowing the New York Post’s article on Biden, US President Donald Trump took to Twitter and wrote, “So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost”. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician.
