Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI told his company to be on the lookout for supposed Russian misinformation on its platform during the 2020 presidential election.
This pressure would later spur Facebook to censor reports on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
Zuckerberg made the revelation on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Thursday.
“The FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that 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. So just be vigilant,'” Zuckerberg said of the FBI’s communication with Facebook.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
— Minds? (@minds) August 25, 2022
Zuckerberg said Facebook declined to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story as aggressively as Twitter did but restricted its overall reach by a “meaningful” percentage.
The Big Tech kingpin said the FBI’s nudge was key in the company’s decision to clamp down on the story.
“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 that we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously.”
Zuckerberg claimed that the laptop story “basically fit the pattern” of the Russian disinformation that the FBI had warned Facebook about, according to Fox News.
His admission of FBI involvement in Big Tech censorship follows whistleblower claims of an organized operation to prevent a meaningful investigation of Hunter Biden before the 2020 presidential election.
NewsBusters polling suggests that as many as 9.4 percent of Biden voters in swing states would’ve reconsidered their vote if they had had full knowledge of the Hunter Biden controversy.
This pool of voters could’ve potentially reversed the outcome of the election.
Zuckerberg admitted to feeling regret about censoring a story that was ultimately vindicated as truthful.
“It sucks,” Zuckerberg said on Rogan’s podcast, according to the New York Post. “It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false.”
Numerous media outlets have verified that the laptop recovered from a Delaware computer repair shop — full of incriminating photos and videos of the president’s son, in addition to emails regarding his foreign business dealings — belonged to Hunter Biden.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
