Zuckerberg Tells Rogan FB Was Wrong To Ban NY Post Report

Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook made a mistake over its decision to ban sharing of The NY Post’s exclusive report on Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

According to The Post, the billionaire CEO of Meta said he regretted Facebook’s response to the Biden story during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast after the host pressed him to explain his views on how tech platforms should handle content moderation on sensitive subjects.

“When something like that turns out to be real, is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the distribution of that story?” Rogan asked about The Post’s Hunter Biden scoop.

Mark Zuckerberg

“Yeah, it sucks,” Zuckerberg said. “It turned out after the fact, the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false … I think it sucks, though, in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks.”

He said the platform opted to limit sharing on the story — but not halt it entirely — after the FBI told Meta employees to be wary of Russian propaganda ahead of the election. More than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed on to a letter that claimed the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“Our protocol is different than Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that,” Zuckerberg said.

Rogan agreed that Facebook’s approach was “certainly much more reasonable than Twitter’s stance.” The podcast host also acknowledged the difficult decision facing social media platforms regarding politically sensitive stories ahead of an election.

“I just don’t think they looked at it hard enough. When the New York Post is talking about it, they’re pretty smart about what they release and what they don’t release,” Rogan said.

“For the 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,” Zuckerberg added. “You could still share it, you could still consume it.”

While Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had also reduced distribution of the report on its own platform, he tried to defend the process as “reasonable.”

“I think the process was pretty reasonable,” he added. “A lot of people were still able to share it,” “We got a lot of complaints that that was the case.

“This is a hyper-political issue, so depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor enough or censored it way too much, but we weren’t as black and white about it as Twitter,” he added.

The tech CEO also took thinly veiled swipes at Twitter, calling the rival social network’s ban overly “black and white.”

Twitter briefly suspended The Post’s account in 2020 after the laptop exposé revealed the existence of tens of thousands of emails between the president’s son and business associates. The emails revealed how Biden’s son leveraged his political access in his overseas business dealings.