Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2018.
Photo:
josh edelson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
When Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the 2020 election, it was mindful of a warning about Russian propaganda that it had received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, who discussed it this week on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Mr. Zuckerberg said the FBI told Facebook that “there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” and “there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.” Mr. Rogan, showing a good interviewer’s killer instinct, asked whether the FBI explicitly flagged Hunter’s laptop as disinformation. “No,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fits the pattern.”
Unlike Twitter,
which completely blocked users from sharing the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop, Facebook merely limited its viral reach. For roughly five to seven days, Mr. Zuckerberg said, while fact-checkers were trying to determine whether the story was true or not, “the ranking in News Feed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.” He didn’t know numbers offhand, though it was “meaningful.”
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed regret about it. “It sucks,” he said. Yet he also defended the procedure that Facebook followed in putting the story into digital limbo until fact-checkers could weigh in. “I think the process was pretty reasonable,” he said. “We still let people share it. But obviously you don’t want situations like that.” And we now know Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, as were its contents, despite the false claim by 50 supposed national security experts that it was Russian propaganda.
So can the country look forward to more of the same in 2024? Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have the right to throttle or even delete posts, but that narrative about private property gets complicated, to say the least, if the government is leaning on them to do it. The First Amendment might be implicated.
We’d like to know more about what exactly the FBI told Facebook and Twitter in 2020, not to mention what those communications look like now. House Republicans are probably equally curious. Mr. Zuckerberg might need to make some time on his schedule if the GOP wins subpoena power in November.
Review & Outlook: Publications that ignored the Hunter Biden story in 2020 now admit it’s real. Will Joe Biden finally answer the questions he refused to answer before he became President? Images: New York Post/AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
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