Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on "The Joe Rogan Experience" Thursday. While on there Zuckerberg made a stunning admission about the Hunter Biden laptop leading up to the 2020 election.
The FBI warned Zuckerberg to be on the lookout for "Russian disinformation" on his platform during the 2020 presidential election. This warning spurred Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“The FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was 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 that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,'” Zuckerberg said of communication between the FBI and Facebook.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022
Zuckerberg said Facebook did not completely censor the story as Twitter did, but they greatly reduced the overall reach of the story. The Facebook CEO said the warning by the FBI was a key component in censoring the story.
“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.”
Zuckerberg admits it was unfortunate the story was later uncovered as truthful after his company made the decision to censor it.
“It sucks,” Zuckerberg said. “It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false.”