Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI told his company to be on the lookout for supposed Russian misinformation on its platform during the 2020 presidential election.
This pressure would later spur Facebook to censor reports on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
Zuckerberg made the revelation on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Thursday.
“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 the FBI’s communication with 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 declined to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story as aggressively as Twitter did but restricted its overall reach by a “meaningful” percentage.
The Big Tech kingpin said the FBI’s nudge was key in the company’s decision to clamp down on 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 claimed that the laptop story “basically fit the pattern” of the Russian disinformation that the FBI had warned Facebook about, according to Fox News.
His admission of FBI involvement in Big Tech censorship follows whistleblower claims of an organized operation to prevent a meaningful investigation of Hunter Biden before the 2020 presidential election.
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