Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook algorithmically censored the ‘Hunter Biden laptop’ story for a week.
Zuckerberg admitted it on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast. Mark said that he did so because of a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation.
During the podcast, Joe asked Zuckerberg how Facebook handles controversial issues…like the Hunter Biden story and whether it was censored.
In response, Zuckerberg said, “So we took a different path than Twitter. I mean, the background here is the FBI came to us…some folks on our team. They were like, Hey, just so you know…you should be (on) high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice. That’s basically…there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
As per ANI, Mark came down on Twitter for completely blacking out the story, and admitted that they did censor the story on Facebook, decreasing its reach.
He said, “So our protocol’s different from Twitter. What Twitter did is…they said… you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that. What we did was…if something is reported to us as potential misinformation…important misinformation, we also run third-party fact-checking programs because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false and…I think it was five or seven days when it was being determined whether it was false, the distribution of Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”