Reflecting over Facebook's decision to curb the story's spread was a note the FBI gave the company about dumps of Russian propaganda on the eve of the election, Zuckerberg explained in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan released Thursday.
"The background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert ... we thought 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 that's similar to that. So just be vigilant,'" Zuckerberg said.
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The revelation about the FBI warning is not new. Moments after a firestorm burst over Big Tech's censorship of the New York Post's story on the laptop in October 2020, Zuckerberg said the FBI cautioned Facebook about "hack and leak" content that the Russians might dump misinformation to interfere with the election.
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Rogan continued by asking the Meta chief if he regretted the company's actions.
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"I mean, it sucks. Yeah," Zuckerberg said. "It turned out after the fact — the fact-checkers looked into it, and no one was able to say it was false. Right. So basically, it had this period where it was getting less distribution."
"I think the process was pretty reasonable. You know, we still let people share it," he added.
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Zuckerberg also likened Facebook's handling of Hunter Biden laptop reporting to its rival Twitter, which blocked users from sharing the New York Post altogether and even briefly halted the news outlet's Twitter account before relenting.
"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," he said. "If something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we use third-party fact-checking because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false."
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Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed regret for his company's decision to censor the laptop story, admitting it was a "total mistake."
Amid the exchange, Zuckerberg explained how he works with the content moderation aspect of Facebook's mandate. He argued that he views the dilemma between eliminating harmful information and allowing free speech to be "all trade-offs all the way down."
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Zuckerberg said Facebook tries to emulate the United States's separation of powers with its content oversight board to ensure no one person had too much censorship power and stressed the importance of having strong processes to navigate such a dicey issue.
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