Republicans are demanding that Mark Zuckerberg be called to Congress to testify over his revelations on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
At the centre of the GOP outrage was the Facebook and Meta founder’s remark that a policy of “decreased distribution” was enacted in connection to a story by the New York Post stemming from Hunter Biden’s laptop in late 2020.
Mr Biden left the laptop at a computer shop in Delaware in 2019 and a copy of the hard drive was later handed to former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in September 2020 by the shop owner, who also shared the contents with the Department of Justice. A copy of the hard drive eventually ended up in the hands of the New York Post.
Mr Zuckerberg said his company had been approached by the FBI, appealing for them to be aware that content may be shared in an attempt to polarize the American electorate in the lead-up to the election. Russian propaganda had been widespread on Facebook during the 2016 election campaign.
“We just kind of thought, hey look, if the FBI — which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” the Meta CEO told Mr Rogan.
He noted that Facebook handled the situation differently compared to Twitter.
While Facebook users were allowed to share the story, it appeared in fewer people’s newsfeeds, meaning that it received less overall traffic.
Mr Zuckerberg said the FBI told Facebook that “we have it on notice that there is about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant”.
“I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false. The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it. You could still consume it,” Mr Zuckerberg said on the podcast.
He said he was unable to remember if he had been specifically warned about the New York Post story but that it “fit the pattern”.
Georgia US Representative Andrew Clyde, tweeted: “This isn’t just insane, it’s election interference. The Oversight Committee must immediately invite Mark Zuckerberg to testify—under oath—about the FBI’s attempts to circumvent the First Amendment. The American people deserve answers and accountability.”
“So when you say the distribution is decreased, how does that work?” Mr Rogan asked Mr Zuckerberg.
“The ranking in the newsfeed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than otherwise,” he said.
When asked by how many per cent it decreased, the tech CEO said, “I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s meaningful. But basically, a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case”.
“We weren’t, sort of, as black and white about it as Twitter,” he added.
“I mean, it sucks, it turned out after the fact. The fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false, right. So basically it had this period where it was getting less distribution,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “I think it probably, it sucks though, I think in the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial, but being proven innocent in the end, sucks. Like it still sucks that you had to go through a criminal trial, but at the end you’re free.”
“I don’t know if the answer would’ve been don’t do anything or don’t have any process. I think the process was pretty reasonable. We still let people share it, but obviously, you don’t want situations like that,” he added.
“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,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“If something’s reported to us as potentially, misinformation, important misinformation, we also use this third party fact-checking program, cause we don’t wanna be deciding what’s true and false,” he added.
Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley claimed that “the FBI preemptively warned Facebook off Hunter Biden laptop reporting”.
“Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?” Mr Rogan asked Mr Zuckerberg.
“I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern,” he said.
Mr Hawley added: “This same agency effectively laundered Russian disinfo in the 2016 election in the form of Steele dossier. And later lied to a court to get wiretaps.”
The Republican Mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, former wrestler Glenn Jacobs, wrote, “so a federal government agency convinced a private company to shadow ban a story which turned out to be true and had massive implications on a presidential election. This is borderline fascism and should worry everyone”.
“Complete corruption, plain and simple. The FBI and the DOJ must provide answers about why they interfered on behalf of Joe Biden,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said.
“This is a really irresponsible framing of Zuckerberg’s comments,” Elizabeth Nolan Brown tweeted. “He says the FBI said to be vigilant about misinformation around election time, not that agents specifically told Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
“All sorts of gov actors need to meddle less in tech company decisions. I don’t doubt the FBI was heavy-handed [with reference to] how social platforms handled content around the election. But this isn’t the weird smoking gun lots of people are making it out to be (also, it was Trump’s FBI!),” she added.
