Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg criticised Twitter’s prohibition of sharing a story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Mr Rogan asked Mr 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,” Mr 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.
“Our protocol is different from Twitter’s,” he said. “What Twitter did is they said ‘you can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that.”
Instead, Mr Zuckerbeg said that if something is reported as misinformation, it has a third-party fact-checking team that determines if it’s is misinformation.
“For the, I think it was five or seven days, it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it,” Mr Zuckerberg told Mr Rogan. “It basically, the ranking in newsfeed was a little bit less.”
Mr Rogan asked the percentage of the decrease in distribution.
“I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s meaningful,” he said. “But basically, a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case.”
Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged it was a “hyper-political issue”, so people thought they censored it too much or not enough depending on which side of the political spectrum they fell.
“But we weren’t as black and white about it as Twitter,” he said. Rather, he said that if the FBI said that Facebook needed to be on guard about a potential threat, it would take the warning seriously.
Numerous conservatives before and after the 2020 presidential election have criticised Twitter’s censoring of the article. Many Republicans have criticised Mr Zuckerberg for using a foundation to pay local counties to help with their elections, which they say was part of the untrue scheme that the 2020 election was stolen.
