- NEW YORK POST - Thomas Barrabi - AUG 25, 2022 -
Mark Zuckerberg finally admitted on Thursday that Facebook dropped the ball when the company banned the sharing of The Post’s exclusive report on Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
The billionaire CEO of Meta said he regretted Facebook’s handling of the bombshell story during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” — but he still defended the process as “pretty reasonable.”
Zuckerberg opened up about the controversial media suppression after the host pressed him to explain his views on how tech platforms should handle content moderation on sensitive subjects.
“When something like that turns out to be real, is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the distribution of that story?” Rogan asked about The Post’s Hunter Biden scoop.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Zuckerberg said. “It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks.”
He said the platform opted to limit sharing on the story — but not halt it entirely — after the FBI told Meta employees to be wary of Russian propaganda ahead of the election.
“Did [the FBI] specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?” Rogan asked, referring to The Post’s article.
“No, I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern,” Zuckerberg said.
He also said, “The FBI basically came to us… [saying], ‘Hey, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on a notice that there is about to be some kind of a dump that is similar to that, so be just vigilant.'”
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed on to a letter that claimed the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“Our protocol is different than Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that,” Zuckerberg said.
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