Why now, Zuckerberg?
He could’ve explained it several different ways but he chose to pile on the FBI by painting them as the bad guy while trying to basically exonerate himself.
During the summer of 2020 when the original news on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop broke in the New York Post, the FBI and other anti-Trump tools of the bureaucracy began working overtime to censor the story and prevent its spread.
The reason for this knee-jerk call to censor the story as “Russian disinformation” was that the now-confirmed laptop contained tons and tons of incriminating evidence against the entire Biden family, including Joe Biden himself.
Twitter banned the New York Post from its platform in response and wouldn’t allow anyone to share the story. Facebook didn’t quite go to the same extreme but it did place limits on how far the story could travel and downgraded its distribution.
Now, from the lips of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, we know more of the story behind why all these tech companies suddenly joined in lockstep to suppress factual information that was damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential run.
The FBI asked them to:
Zuckerberg criticized Twitter’s prohibition of sharing a story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter – saying his own social network “took a different path”.
Rogan asked Zuckerberg about the attention Twitter received ahead of the 2020 election for banning the sharing a story by The New York Post about the contents of the future president’s son’s laptop.
“We took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said. The Facebook founder said that the FBI approached Facebook’s team and said that it should be on high alert about Russian propaganda in the election.
According to Zuckerberg, the FBI had warned Facebook that there would be some kind of upcoming Russian disinformation campaign and to be on high alert. What Zuckerberg then alleges is that shortly after that, the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story broke and the platform had to decide what to do with the story.
Unlike Twitter, Zuckerberg contends, which started banning and censoring, Facebook simply decided to “limit distribution” which is a very vague way of saying they censored the story as well.
What gets lost in all this is that the FBI may have already been aware of the story and was aware that it was about to make waves in the election. In an effort to suppress and prevent the laptop story from gaining traction, a campaign was waged to limit its distribution and discredit it by calling it “Russian disinformation” despite no evidence to that claim.
In short, Zuckerberg is either admitting that he and his company were allowed to be used by the FBI or that he and his campaign agreed with the decision to censor content it doesn’t like.
As Tom Fitton said on Twitter, the FBI may have been working to obstruct its own investigation by trying to squash the issue before it got out in the open:
So not only did FBI obstruct its own investigation of Hunter and Joe Biden but encouraged censorship of Americans just before the elections to protect Joe Biden! Absolutely criminal. https://t.co/0CBDv7xQRi
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 25, 2022
If you watch the video embedded in the Tweet above, Zuckerberg ends the discussion by saying he couldn’t remember if the FBI was specifically warning about the Hunter Biden laptop story or basically just things that fit a specific pattern.
Who decides if a story fits a certain pattern?
By that open-ended protocol, any story that a CNN analyst like former CIA Director John Brennan, a noted Never-Trumper, says is “Russian disinformation,” could be made to fit the pattern and require censorship.
When federal law enforcement becomes a “Fact Check” organization in the interests of censoring information, Americans of all political stripes should be paying attention.
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