- According to Mark Zuckerberg, the FBI’s false warnings were the reason Facebook restricted a story about Joe Biden’s son during the 2020 election.
- According to The New York Post, emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop that were allegedly hacked showed the former vice president was assisting his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
- The hard drive at its core was given to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the FBI’s false warnings were the reason Facebook restricted a story about Joe Biden’s son during the 2020 election.
According to The New York Post, emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop that were allegedly hacked showed the former vice president was assisting his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Facebook and Twitter limited the article’s ability to be shared before changing their minds in response to claims of censorship.
Making the wrong choice, according to Zuckerberg, “sucks.”
In a rare extended media interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg said, “When we take down something that we’re not meant to, that’s the worst.”
Just a few weeks prior to Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the New York Post article was published.
It was said that emails on a laptop Hunter Biden left at a repair shop had information about Hunter introducing his father to a Ukrainian energy entrepreneur and setting up a meeting. On Mr. Biden’s schedule, there is no indication that such a meeting has ever taken place.
In a critical sense, it contributed to long-running unfounded claims that Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing to support his son’s Ukrainian business.
In such a situation, the New York Post piece, which was based on unique data that no other news organization had access to, was criticized and censored on social media.
Zuckerberg told Rogan: “The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought 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.”
He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular – only that Facebook thought it “fit that pattern”.
The article is still debatable. The hard drive at its core was given to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
After conducting its own investigation more than a year after the initial report, the Washington Post came to the conclusion that while the laptop and some emails were probably real, the vast majority of the material could not be authenticated owing to “sloppy management of the data.”
The New York Times and other once doubtful news organizations concur that at least some of the emails are authentic.
Rogan, one of the most well-known podcasters in the world with millions of listeners for each episode, has previously been charged with disseminating false material.
Asking Zuckerberg if he regretted suppressing the factual story, the Facebook founder replied: “It sucks… I think in the same way that having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks… in the end you’re free.”
But Zuckerberg acknowledged that there remained disagreement about the story, which he said was a “hyper-political issue”.
“Depending on what side of the political spectrum [you’re on], you either think we didn’t censor it enough or we censored it way too much.”
While third-party fact-checkers attempted to confirm the reporting, Facebook did not fully forbid sharing of the item but instead restricted how much of it its algorithm automatically shared to other people for a week.
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