Alwaght- Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta, revealed that Facebook did limit newsfeed sharing of a story about US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his laptop after warnings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Zuckerberg said his social media platform did not ban people from sharing the Post’s story, but it took action to limit how often the story appeared on feeds.
In an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan that was uploaded on Thursday, Zuckerberg however defended the FBI as a “legitimate institution.”
Zuckerberg said that the FBI reached out to his company ahead of the 2020 presidential election and urged them to take action against potentially polarizing content.
The Facebook owner said his social media platform took the warning seriously.
US deep state ‘overtly stole the 2020 election’: Journalist
Commenting on Zuckerberg’s admission, New York-based journalist Don DeBar called the revelation further proof of deep state meddling in the disputed presidential election, adding that US intelligence agencies “overtly stole the 2020 election.”
“This is a further example of the FBI and other US intelligence agencies illegally meddling in the election process in the United States, a phenomenon that evokes the comment by Malcolm X of 'chickens coming home to roost,’” he said.
“From Italy in 1940s to Iran and Guatemala and other places in the 1950s - and pretty much the rest of the world in the decades ever since - US intelligence agencies, using the propaganda arms of the Broadcast Board of Governors and the corporate and foundation press in the US and Europe, have meddled deeply in the internal politics of countries around the world. Obama removed the formal restriction against using the Federal propaganda agencies against the American public. And with the rise of social media, a construct of control has been developed that makes Nixon's abuse of the FBI and CIA look like a schoolyard prank,” he stated.
“Clearly, these same parties overtly stole the 2020 election. And the proof of the reach of this kind of suppression of information is evident from the complete lack of coverage of that theft,” he noted.
The New York Post revealed shortly before the 2020 election that Hunter was involved in shady dealings in Ukraine, which were found on a laptop that he had apparently left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019.
Hunter's laptop scandal was blocked on several social media outlets, including Facebook. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later called the move to block the scandal a "total mistake."
Facebook took steps to limit the spread of the Post story. The company’s policy communications manager Andy Stone tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Then-US President Donald Trump and some of his allies seized on the report at the time. Trump accused Facebook and Twitter of wanting to help Biden’s campaign by enforcing policies that restrict users' ability to share their story.
“Now, Big Tech — you see what’s going on with Big Tech? — is censoring these stories to try and get Biden out of this impossible jam. He’s in a big jam,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina in October 2020.
"He and his family are crooked and they were caught, they got caught," Trump added.
The claims made in the Post story hinge on emails reportedly retrieved from the hard drive of a laptop dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
A store owner is said to have provided a copy of the hard drive to an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who now serves as Trump's personal lawyer before the FBI seized the hard drive.
Pulitzer Prize-winner American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has revealed in a recent article that an axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election to help Biden win the vote.
He wrote that “the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party” censored and suppressed “a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden.
