TheQuartering [8/26/2022]
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook restricting a story about Joe Biden’s son during the 2020 election was based on FBI misinformation warnings.
The New York Post alleged leaked emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop showed the then vice-president was helping his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Facebook and Twitter restricted sharing of the article, before reversing course amid allegations of censorship.
Zuckerberg said that getting the decision wrong “sucks”.
“When we take down something that we’re not supposed to, that’s the worst,” Zuckerberg said in a rare extended media interview on the Joe Rogan podcast.
The New York Post story was released just weeks before the presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which Mr Biden won.
It claimed that a laptop, abandoned in a repair shop by Hunter Biden, contained emails which included details of Hunter introducing a Ukrainian energy tycoon to his father and arranging a meeting. There is no record on Mr Biden’s schedule that such a meeting ever took place.
Critically, it fed into long-running unproven allegations about corruption on Joe Biden’s part to ensure his son’s business success in Ukraine.
In that context, the New York Post story, based on exclusive data no other news agency had access to, was met with scepticism – and censored by social media outlets.
Zuckerberg told Rogan: “The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was 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 basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.”
He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular – only that Facebook thought it “fit that pattern”.