Facebook CEO told Joe Rogan that the FBI came to the social media platform regarding potential “Russian propaganda” being dumped right before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke.
Facebook, like Twitter, suppressed the story:
“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.
The story was not propaganda at all. Those five to seven days really harmed the story along with Facebook’s reputation:
“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.
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