Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook), said the silent part loudly. Joe Rogan, the acclaimed podcast host, said that Facebook had blocked the Hunter Biden laptop scam after an FBI general request.
Zuckerberg went on Rogan’s podcast Aug. 25, and Rogan asked him about how Facebook deals with supposed “misinformation,” specifically highlighting the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Big Tech blocked the Biden scandal right before the 2020 elections. This was an act that the Media Research Center found helped Big Media and Big Tech win the 2020 election. Zuckerberg admitted readily that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had forced his platform’s censorship.
“I mean, basically the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, [to] some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, umm, 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 of, of—um, uh—that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
Zuckerberg then tried to claim that Facebook’s response had actually been pro-free speech—in comparison to Twitter’s censorship of the story. “So our protocol was different from Twitter’s,” Zuckerberg said. “What Twitter did is they said, ‘You can’t share this at all.’ Um, we didn’t do that.”
Continued the Meta CEO
“What we do is we have, um—if something is reported to us as potentially, um, misinformation, important misinformation— We also have a third-party fact-checking program. 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, um, being determined whether it was false, um, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”
Zuckerberg then explained how Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story while the platform’s fact-checkers reviewed it. “The ranking on [Facebook’s] newsfeed was a little bit less,” Zuckerberg said. “So, fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”
Rogan asked Zuckerberg if he had any percentage on the increase in readers due to that censorship. Zuckerberg said he had no exact number, but added, “It’s meaningful.”
Zuckerberg then attempted to defend Facebook’s biased censorship. “We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI—which, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country; it’s a 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.”
Rogan wanted to know if FBI asked specifically for censorship regarding the Hunter Biden affair. “Did they specifically say you needed to be on guard about that story?” asked Rogan. “No. I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it was—it basically fit the pattern,” Zuckerberg answered evasively.
The bombshell was silenced by both Twitter and Facebook New York Post reporting implicating President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in corrupt foreign business dealings, and Facebook did so before any fact-checks were issued on the story. One Newsweek Analysis revealed that Post’s Story reached approximately 1.94 Million people. While anti-Trump stories reached around 5.37 M people.
All Facebook fact-checkers must be approved by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network. Poynter is partially funded by Pierre Omidyar, a leftist billionaire.
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