Big Tech and the federal government appear to be working together to silence speech
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on the Aug. 25 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that his platform censored the Hunter Biden bombshell reporting by the New York Post only after receiving FBI pressure.
This week, we looked at what he had to say as well as Meta’s and the FBI’s reported response. All this and more on this week’s episode of CensorTrack with Paiten.
Nearly two years after Facebook infamously suppressed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories, Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook censored the story upon an FBI tip about forthcoming “Russian propaganda.”
Zuckerberg said, “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 - 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 - um, uh - that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
Facebook’s parent company Meta and the FBI gave follow-up statements on Zuckerberg’s comments.
Meta echoed the comments, reiterating that it “temporarily reduced [the story’s] distribution to give fact-checking partners time to review it.”
The FBI claimed, according to Reclaim the Net, that it “routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats.”
The bureau acknowledged in its statement that it cannot legally tell companies to censor specific stories. But after you peel away the semantics, the FBI still pressured — or at the very least appeared to signal — platforms to take a desired course of action.
And speaking of Facebook censorship, the platform also silenced criticism of the Biden administration’s new student loan forgiveness program.
Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee posted on Facebook, “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”
Facebook removed the post, claiming it violated the platform’s “Community Standards,” according to screenshots shared by the lawmakers’ account.
Zuckerberg’s interview and the censorship of House Judiciary Committee Republicans are just the latest examples of Big Tech’s undeniable bias.
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