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In his eagerness to ingratiate himself with mega-podcaster Joe Rogan, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg inadvertently revealed that the FBI had been more explicit than previously known in its private warning about Russian disinformation shortly before The Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the social media company suppressed before the 2020 election.
While Facebook won’t say exactly what the FBI told them, it has told The Post that Hunter Biden was not mentioned. But it refuses to rule out whether Joe Biden or Ukraine were raised in the FBI’s defensive briefing to Facebook weeks before the Oct. 14, 2020, publication of our story implicating the then-Democratic presidential candidate in his son’s lucrative Ukrainian influence-peddling schemes.
“Basically, 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,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “ ‘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.’ ”
When Rogan asked if the FBI had told Facebook to be on guard specifically for our story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg claimed, rather unconvincingly that he did “not remember . . . specifically” but “it basically fit the pattern.”
In response to questions from The Post, last week Facebook refused to give the date of the FBI private briefing or details of the “pattern” the FBI told them to look out for.
Since our story had nothing to do with Russian disinformation, what made Facebook think it was the “dump” the FBI warned them about? We asked Facebook: “Was there mention made in the FBI briefing of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine or a laptop?”
Facebook’s answer was curious. “The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden.”
Note the omissions.
Whatever was said, the briefing must have been specific enough for Facebook to recognize immediately that our story was exactly what the FBI was warning about and move at record speed to throttle it. At 11:10 a.m. the morning the story went live, Democratic operative Andy Stone, Facebook’s communications manager, issued a statement on Twitter announcing “we are reducing its distribution on our platform” while the story is “fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.
