Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, the social media giant received a warning from the FBI which prompted Facebook to limit the story’s reach on the platform ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The billionaire tech mogul said the FBI approached Facebook and warned it to “be vigilant” before the New York Post story on the contents of Joe Biden’s son’s laptop.
The revelation was made as Zuckerberg was pressed on how tech platforms should handle content moderation on sensitive subjects during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
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“We took a different path than Twitter,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Rogan.
“What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that. What we do is we have, if something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also visited third party fact checking program because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true or false.”
Zuckerberg went on to defend Facebook’s move and said while it decreased the distribution of the story, users were still allowed to share it.
“It basically, the ranking in the newsfeed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would’ve otherwise,” he said.
Asked by what percentage, Zuckerberg said: “I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s meaningful.”
“But basically, a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case.
“But we weren’t as black and white about it as Twitter. 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 we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously.”
In October 2020, Twitter suspended the New York Post account after the publication exclusively revealed the existence of Hunter’s emails.
The owner of a repair shop in Hunter’s home state of Delaware told The Post the computer was dropped off in April 2019.
The hard drive contained emails, text messages, phone calls and financial documents between Hunter, his family and business associates, including the relationship between him and his business partner Devon Archie and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019.
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