Mark Zuckerberg Says FBI Came to Facebook Warning of ‘Russian Propaganda’ Dump Before Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his first appearance on Joe Rogan‘s podcast this week and detailed the circumstances surrounding the platform suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
On Thursday’s edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg sat down to discuss his life, the future of technology, and the unavoidable topic of social media censorship.
The conversation took a turn when Rogan asked how Facebook handles controversial news topics, and specifically whether they blocked or censored the Hunter Biden story like Twitter did.
“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — 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 — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.'”
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said ‘You can’t share this at all.’ Um, we didn’t do that,” he added. “If something’s reported to us as potentially, um, misinformation, important misinformation, we also use this third party fact-checking program, cause we don’t wanna be deciding what’s true and false,” he continued.
“I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being, um, being determined, whether it was false. The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it. You could still consume it,” he said.
When Rogan pushed Zuckerberg about the meaning of “decreased distribution,” he explained that the story appeared lower on newsfeeds, to a “meaningful” degree.
“We weren’t, sort of, as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, 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 wanna take that seriously,” Zuckerberg said.
“Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?” Rogan asked.
“Uh — I, no — I, I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it was — it basically fit the pattern,” Zuckerberg replied.
Rogan then flipped the conversation, asking about the aftermath of suppressing stories like Hunter Biden’s, which proved to be factual.
“Yeah. I mean, it sucks. I mean, it turned out after the fact, I mean the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false, right. So basically it had this period where it was getting less distribution,” Zuckerberg said.
“I think it probably, it sucks though, I think in the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial, but being proven innocent in the end, sucks. Like it still sucks that you had to go through a criminal trial, but at the end you’re free,” he added.
“I don’t know if the answer would’ve been don’t do anything or don’t have any process. I think the process was pretty reasonable, you know, it’s — we still let people share it, but obviously you don’t want situations like that,” he concluded.
Listen above via The Joe Rogan Experience.
—
