Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, told podcast host Joe Rogan in a recent interview that the company actively reduced the reach of social media posts referencing the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
On the Aug. 25 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Zuckerberg said that the move was in response to a general advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to some Facebook staffers to be vigilant for Russian propaganda before the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg’s remarks were in response to Rogan’s question: “How do you handle things when there’s a big news item that’s controversial, like there was a lot of attention on Twitter during the election because of the Hunter Biden laptop story?”
In response to Rogan’s question, Zuckerberg said: “The background here is the FBI I think basically came to some folks on our team [and] were like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. 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 similar to that, so just be vigilant.’”
Zuckerberg said that the protocol Facebook took was “different from Twitter’s.”
“What Twitter did [was] they said ‘you can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Hunter Biden laptop story. “What we do is, if something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation—we also do third-party fact-checking programs because 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 determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you can still share it, you could still consume it.”
