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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast this week, and the conversation touched on a variety of topics, including the future of technology and Hunter Biden’s laptop story.
Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI had warned Facebook about a possible dump of Russian propaganda before the story broke, but he said he did not block it from being shared, unlike Twitter.
The Facebook CEO also addressed the issue of misinformation and said that the platform is working on ways to better identify and flag false information.
Overall, Zuckerberg came across as level-headed and reasonable, in contrast to the panic and confusion that has characterized much of the reaction to the Hunter Biden story.
The narrative’s “deleted by the author” status was due to a mistake on Facebook’s part, according to Zuckerberg. The laptop had no indication from the FBI that it belonged to Hunter Biden, he said. Until independent fact-checkers investigated, Facebook decreased the release of the story.
Zuckerberg: “So we took a different path than Twitter. Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert.’
“There was the — 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 of — 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.’ Um, we didn’t do that.
“If something’s reported to us as potentially, um, misinformation, important misinformation, we also use this third party fact-checking program, cause we don’t wanna be deciding what’s true and false.
“I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being, um, 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.
“We weren’t, sort of, as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement.”
This is not the first time that Zuckerberg has taken a different approach to content than Twitter. When Twitter started fact-checking President Donald Trump’s tweets, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would not be following suit because he did not believe it was the role of a private company to be the “arbiter of truth.”
However, unlike Twitter, which banned all links to the story, Facebook only applied a fact-checking label to it.
Zuckerberg says that Facebook’s protocol is different from Twitter’s and that the company does not want to be in the business of deciding what is true and false.
He also says that Facebook is working on ways to prevent foreign interference in elections and that the company will continue to allow people to share their opinions, even if they are controversial.
