As everyone not living under a rock now knows, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook reduced the distribution of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell because the FBI warned them in the days leading up to the drop of the story that “Russian disinformation” was expected to be released soon.
Specifically, Zuckerberg said:
“The FBI basically came to us… and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election and we have noticed that, basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So, just be vigilant.’”
He added that Facebook did not stop sharing of the story, as Twitter did, but rather just limited distribution of it, saying:
“So, our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said ‘you can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that. The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”
Continuing and describing what happened as a result of the Facebook policy, he added that:
“The ranking in newsfeed was a little bit less. Fewer people saw it than they would have otherwise.”
Of course, the problem there is that the story was not Russian disinformation. It was good, old-fashioned journalism that could have made a major impact on the election had social media companies not censored it, which they apparently did at the behest of the woke and Trump-hating FBI.
Well, the FBI has since responded to what Zuckerberg said on Rogan’s podcast. Here’s what NBC News reports about what it said:
In a statement Friday night, the FBI said it has provided companies with “foreign threat indicators” to help protect their platforms and customers, but that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received.”
“The FBI routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” the agency said.
Notice what’s wrong there? Namely, the complete refusal to either deny that it falsely labeled a highly important news story “Russian disinformation” or an apology for doing so?
Meta, for its part, responded to the FBI statement on Twitter, saying:
As we’ve said, nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop story is new. Below is what Mark told Sen. Johnson in Oct 2020 and what Mark told Joe Rogan this week. The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference – nothing specific about Hunter Biden.
But while Meta was obviously not seeking a confrontation, GOP Senator Chuck Grassley was and he skewered the agency in a tweet, saying:
We now know Facebook censored spread of Hunter Biden laptop story after FBI approached them. FBI & Facebook/Big Tech interfered in 2020 election Facebook acted as an arm of govt Both Facebook & FBI should b ashamed of interfering in our electoral process
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Facebook and Subscribe to My Email List