Over the past couple years, it’s no secret we’ve seen a lot of social media posts get flagged, accounts get shadow banned, and some, downright deleted… all in the name of combating the spread of “misinformation.”
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… they all do it.
And perhaps the biggest and most debated example of this was the Hunter Biden laptop story.
We’ve all probably heard by now about the Hunter Biden laptop story, and how The New York Post published a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and some compromising materials that were on it, just a few weeks before the 2020 election.
Was it just Russian propaganda? A right-wing smear tactic? An outright fabrication?
Most social companies dismissed it as “misinformation” and Twitter went as far to ban the sharing of the story, and even temporarily deactivated President Trump’s Twitter account for sharing the story.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was hauled into a congressional hearing, as was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg… it was quite the free speech ordeal.
And the big problem… the story turned out to be true.
But it appears as though there might be more to the story, in fact, it appears that the FBI might have been the ones to encourage the social media empires to slow the spread of this story.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and human robot, practically confirmed these “conspiracy theories” as true, all while sitting down with Joe Rogan on his podcast.
Seriously, Zuckerberg just rolled out the information like he and Joe were throwing back some beers at the bar, chatting away.
He admitted that Facebook algorithmically censored Hunter Biden’s laptop story, due to a request from the FBI to stop the spread of “election misinformation.”
Zuckerberg said:
“Basically the background here is the FBI. I think basically came to some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert. There was, 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. So just be vigilant.’
So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. 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 and false.
And I think it was for the five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”
A bit concerning, to say the least…
Nevertheless, it’s still pretty crazy that the man basically admitted everything a lot of people had been thinking.
Joe and Zucks went deeper on censorship and content moderation:
