Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most-listened to podcast in the world, contained a number of bombshell revelations, foremost among them that the FBI was involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Yet these news stories, which attracted massive attention on other platforms, gained surprisingly little traction on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by guards ( Chip Somodevilla /Getty)
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter depart after attending Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
In the hours following the release of the interview, according to data from social media analytics service Newswhip, the story with the highest velocity on Facebook was a puff piece from Business Insider about Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan — and even that got relatively little engagement compared to other, unrelated stories that were trending on the platform at the same time.
As Breitbart News previously reported, Zuckerberg confirmed in his interview that the FBI warned Facebook of an imminent “Russian propaganda dump” before the New York Post published its first stories on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” which were swiftly suppressed by Facebook and Twitter.
Via Breitbart News:
“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 the — 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 — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
Shortly afterwards, the New York Post published its first article about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” The story was immediately shut down by Twitter, while Facebook reduced its distribution — meaning it appeared on fewer people’s newsfeeds to a “meaningful” degree, according to Zuckerberg.
“We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something. Then I wanna take that seriously.”
Following the swift spread of Zuckerberg’s interview, Facebook representatives reached out proactively to Breitbart News to downplay the news about the FBI’s warnings about “Russian propaganda,” pointing to an earlier interview by the Facebook founder in which he referred to FBI warnings of “hack and leak” operations ahead of the Hunter Biden story.
As news breaks of collusion between the FBI and Facebook on suppressing major election news, and as Facebook works overtime to suppress and downplay that news, the question of how the social network will act ahead of the 2022 midterms and following presidential election is raised. Read my breakdown of Big Tech’s emerging election-meddling blueprint for a glimpse of what is likely on the way.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
