House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has put the Democrats and their allies on notice after it emerged that the FBI pressured Big Tech to suppress a damaging story about President Joe Biden in the run-up to the 2020 election.
As Slay News previously reported, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the bombshell admission on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the FBI told Facebook to block reports on Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell.”
Agents reportedly told Facebook that the laptop story was a “Russian propaganda” campaign.
Zuckerberg said Facebook reacted by throttling the reach of the story until after the election, meaning a large number of voters were unaware of the scandal until after they had cast their ballots.
McCarthy and Republicans now argue that the move was enough to sway the election.
“The FBI colluded with Big Tech to silence news stories weeks before the 2020 election in an attempt to control your access to information,” McCarthy said.
“Democrats in Congress have been intentionally ignoring the facts.
“When Republicans are back in charge, we will hold all of them accountable.”
The FBI colluded with Big Tech to silence news stories weeks before the 2020 election in an attempt to control your access to information.
Democrats in Congress have been intentionally ignoring the facts. When Republicans are back in charge, we will hold all of them accountable. https://t.co/kUc8J9OAvq
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) August 26, 2022
During the appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg said: “Basically, the background here is 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.'”
While Facebook did not outright block the story, Zuckerberg did acknowledge that Facebook reduced the distribution of the story until “independent” left-wing “fact-checkers” investigated it.
The reduced distribution meant that it didn’t appear in people’s News Feed which, in turn, stopped it from spreading as a normal story would.
Twitter, on the other hand, outright blocked the story.
“If something’s reported to us as potentially, um, misinformation, important misinformation, we also use this third party fact-checking program, cause we don’t wanna be deciding what’s true and false,” Zuckerberg added.
“I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being, um, being determined, whether it was false.
“The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.
“So you could still share it.
“You could still consume it.”
However, despite Zuckerberg’s downplaying, the “reduced distribution” had a massive impact on suppressing the story.
While users could still technically share the story on Facebook, nobody else would see that shared post.
Rogan asked the meaning of “decreased distribution,” and Zuckerberg admitted that the story appeared lower on people’s newsfeeds to a “meaningful” degree.
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