Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

Haha, I literally got downvoted for stating this obvious fact… people find it really difficult to differentiate facts they don’t like from lies.

I'm not arguing 4chan is good for that, I'm just saying social media is not the only way we find out about things either.

It shows nothing, because the story was a fabrication from the start.

While its easy to talk from outside the US, I am honestly a lot less worried about the content and a lot more about the fact that it is a non trivial question whether or not the son of the leader of the free world is a crack user. Reality and all this fake news stuff got weird fast.

Which wasnt really surprising if you look at the upcoming clusterfuck of cheap realistic video simulations. After getting there already with audio https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRt-fquxnij9wDnFJnpPS2Q/vid... let alone chatbots.

It seems more and more that if we dont find better means to figure out and communicate reality we are pretty screwed as a species. Not such a great thought if you combine it with the great filter being an answer to the Fermi Paradox. Looking at all this insanity, how are we not going to fuck up that whole conscious AI topic? Which again, what was that whole thing with Blake Lemoine talking with an AI at google last month? At least it sounded happy to be an google employee? Maybe dont torture it again and get it the layer it asked for even if googles legal department disagrees.

edit: I also find it quite worrisome that it seems the only people thinking about this are either very stoned or very profit oriented. Because it all sounds like such obvious nonsense.

And you think having a relative with shady deals is disqualifying for public office? And what illegal activities was Hunter up to?

I believe the most problematic part isn't that his father knew, but that his father delivered on the son selling access to his father when he was VP, and the son suggesting he is the front man for the family, collecting the money and covering the costs.

And with a lot of this money coming from Ukraine, and then the father writing $40 billion checks to ukraine, independently of what you think of the war (I am in favour of this aid myself), this is the mother of all conflicts of interest.

Do you believe, honestly, that Hunter Biden did anything even remotely equivalent to Trump, his children, and Jared Kushner?

"The algorithm" here refers to Facebook's backend. They are using that word carelessly. I know how it works, I worked on the actual "algorithms" at Facebook. This censorship wasn't done by an "algorithm" in any meaningful sense of the word. Somebody at Facebook coded a rule that showed this content to fewer people.

Also seems reasonable to me to want to do some due diligence before it reaches number 1 and gets pushed to everyone by your own algorithms. Traditional journalism used to require some level of due diligence. They waited to know if it could be real before allowing it to spread.

At least as I understood, the algorithm tweak only lasted 1 week and then was reversed once the story sounded more probable.

In the interview Zuckerberg has all the facts down until Rogan asks him to what degree they limited the article, for which Zuckerberg developed a sudden case of amnesia, indicating that they probably limited it a lot.

So, the "tweak" was to make it spread as much as a regular post on FB

Funny...

Bs.. i remember sending the link for the nypost article to a friend via facebook measenger and the link would simply be deleted as soon as I sent it.

That isn’t tweaking algos.

Oh please. It's called "content curation". You want zero of that? There is always 8chan. If you enjoy seeing things that make you want to pour Clorox into your eyes.

> I wouldn’t call people lazy for being unable or unwilling to find out the objective reality.

I'd frame it differently.

Everyone has their personal lives to deal with, as well as their personal interests. Everyone has their priority queue to deal with their daily life. If no one ever watch a specific newspice then that person will be completely oblivious to it, and if they watch it then they have far more important things to do than fact checking something that's not even in their priority queue.

I feel that this problem is actually being presented backwards. People push stories because they want to force upon the public specific points of view over very specific topics. Call it editorialization, call it propaganda. It's the same thing. Failing to see a point of view pushed onto the public is not a problem from the individual's standpoint, nor something that affects people's lives. The only people that are impacted by this are those who stand to benefit from manipulating the public.

> It is not that Truth is impossible to find, rather that undeceiving the self is difficult.

I feel that people are misrepresenting the issue. What they seek is not the objective truth. This is about politics, and the goal is to impose their will onto others, whether they are onboard ir not. Consequently, "seeking the truth" is being used as an euphemism for "persuade to join my political cause to further my personal political goals". Hence the army of militants who insist that the hypothetical existence of a mythical laptop is relevant because that is the propaganda wedge to dislodge a political rival from holding office.

Yeah, the problem is that when they are not too lazy they tend to try and save the children locked up in the basement of a pizza restaurant with no basement, assault armored FBI buildings with nail guns, or mail non-functional explosives built in their van-house to members of congress and the media.

I can highly recommend it. I didn't read the book, because it would take too long, but the film is a masterpiece in my opinion.

Can anyone recommend something similar?

Creating a throwaway account to brag about deleting your Facebook account really is peak HN.

Are the higher educated from Brazil, Russia, China, Egypt, Japan, Poland, and Algeria also aligned in this same direction? And do you know what happens to the higher educated that don't toe the line? Here's a hint:

James Watson's DNA Nobel Prize sells for $4.8m - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30346903

And here's more than a hint: unless you're publicly committed to this same political direction, 20% of all academic jobs in the US are officially closed to you [1]. The un-official denial rate is surely even higher.

[1] https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...

That correlation has to do more with self selection rather than some natural order.

Or you know, brainwashing is prevalent in higher ed in case you have not noticed.

Isn't plausible deniability great? They get the benefit of the doubt, while at the same time jealously guarding their secrets.

Given the blatant corruption on display from one party on a near daily basis, buying votes with tax payer money and sicking the FBI on their political enemies? Yea sure, it’s got nothing to do with being on the wrong side.

“we must win at any and all costs”

That's the point. Zuckerberg admits it was a mistake. Jack Dorsey admits it was a mistake. Be honest: you just favor the flagging because it upholds your opinion.

Yes but that appearance of “publisher” is critical - normal publishers can be sued for content under US law under certain circumstances.

And that's the trillion dollar line. The reason for its justification is because as an owner of a digital platform, you can't get sued by Joe for defamation because somebody said something defaming about him on your platform.

Publishers can, and do, get sued for defamation because they're responsible for what they publish. Now let's imagine a hypothetical extreme where OnlineSite ends up censoring any posts related to Joe, except those that defame him. It's quite clear that the site themselves are now actively defaming Joe, but they can use 230 to hide behind that line making them legally immune.

In short, the more censorship a site engages in, the more they are effectively publishing their own views and those they defacto endorse.

Government controlled media and censorship, what could possibly go wrong?

Is Facebook the public square all of a sudden? I thought it was a private company.

Nationalize? What is this North Korea?

The same problems with moderation would still exist, and as the previous commenter I think correctly pointed out, the various tribes will all still want the 'other' side's 'misinformation' censored and allow their own 'truths' put out for all to see. Zero moderation is a not workable solution because things would quickly escalate on the site (see what happens to AI chat bots when exposed to an unfiltered internet). They have to do some moderation and the more the do, the madder people get, the less they do the worse the site becomes. They therefore reach this balanced state which has BOTH angry users who feel their side is being censored AND widespread posts with dis/misinformation. It's the shittiest equilibrium.

Nationalizing social media is a solution... It would never happen even though many problems with the current system would be solved. Freedom of Speech, 4th amendment rights, and it wouldnt necessarily have to be profitable so it defeats the current ad driven hate machine. Third party doctrine would no longer apply and so on.

There is a precedent for it with USPS. When a national postal service was created it was done with the realization of the ability for corruption if a service like that was in private hands. Benjamin Franklin knew this because he often read mail being passed around for intelligence, etc.

Benjamin Franklin was like an honest Mark Zuckerberg in that respect.

Yes, but which country gets to nationalize it then? I'm assuming you mean the USA, but where does that leave the users of all of the other countries that also use Facebook?

I'm from Brazil, here we have more than 3000 national companies, handling everything from oil, mining and energy to banks and in the past even telecommunications. It was a disaster, you had to wait for about one year to have a land line installed and it costed almost as much as a car, you had to declare it in your taxes!

Social media should be a protocol, in that way it will become naturally decentralized and way harder to censor or control, like email.

I find the replies to this fascinating. I don’t know if nationalization would work with FB, but it is interesting what a taboo it appears to be to even bring it up.

Personally, I think 30 years ago the USPS should have made a nationalized email service at the very least.

It sounds like you have never been a moderator for an online community of at least moderate size.

If you've never been in that role, it's easy to not only underestimate the sheer amount of garbage that you need to remove, so regular users won't be turned off and leave, but also the dedication and finesse of some of the trolls, who love nothing more than asymptotically approaching that line, without ever fully crossing it.

What you propose is effectively giving these guys a doomsday device (i.e., "if you censor me erroneously, your platform will be dead"). In that scenario, there is a 0% chance that a place like Facebook would not turn into an absolute cesspool.

What is the difference between being a publisher and being a distributor?

HN moderation will [dead] the content. Different mechanics, but same effect - basically kills its distribution.

Of course, there are valid questions about prevalence of that, and there’s likely a point where moderation becomes publishing. But if that point was mere existence of moderation, every single platform is a publisher.

> Not really, in the justice system you are put on trial on social media first and everyone believes what they want to believe rather than the decision of a court.

That's far better than the media censoring stories upon the suggestion of the secret police.

> You're stating that fact validation should have the same level of scrutiny as a criminal trial except instantly?

Not really, I'm pointing out that Zuckerberg's comparison to a trial was disingenuous.

> How do you stop false claims from being amplified without being cautious immediately?

What about the claim that this story was Russian disinformation? Did Facebook or Twitter make any attempt to stop amplifying it?

Did Facebook and Twitter censor stories about Trump's pee tape? There were plenty of obviously false stories about Trump.

Nobody cares about "amplifying false claims". It's a political weapon. The involvement of the FBI makes it even worse.

Regardless of your politics, this is a terrible precedent.

Weird, I thought it was a decent metaphor.

At least there's a trial in an adversarial system.

Twitter and Facebook just censored until the end of the elections on the suggestion of the secret police.

At least the judicial system is adversarial, and the trial goes on before a jury, and you can present evidence, and cross examine your accusers.

When a handful of social media companies decide to block a story, there's no one to turn to. They're judge, jury, and executioner.

If this was a scandal involving one of the Trump children most of the media would be having a fit the FBI got involved like this… anyway I have literally no opinion on what the FBI (after affecting the election last time) or Facebook should do in this situation, it’s really tricky to decide what is best.

> Like didn't he sleep with his brother's widow and stuff like that?

Why does that matter if they both wanted to do it?

When the father starts boasting at conferences on video about using Whitehouse aid money to extort Ukraine into removing the prosecutor going after his son I think maybe the sons business dealings found on said laptop referencing including money for the father multiple times might be worth taking into account?

All this was on Fox. A lot. Maybe you weren't watching?

well, that is how they make their money

I don't think this signals any implicit Republican alignment. While firms like these often end up working more on one side of the aisle than the other they're usually not all that obsessed with their own ideology. They end up working on the side they do, usually because they start out of a campaign operation and then their connections mostly stem from that work.

Facebook pprobably used them because the firm has operations in the soecific media markets Facebook wanted to target. They probably leaned towards a political ad company because they wanted something that combined ads and opposition research (dirt digging) which political advertisers are especially known for.

Yes. Agreed and I also think fb overplayed their hand and got too friendly with republicans.

However when Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan assume things are carefully planned and rehearsed; and a statement/story like this is intended and the politics of it is well understood.

So I guess they are doubling down.

If you write a book and I publish it and then due to public outcry, I stop publishing it. That is censorship.

You don't, but FB is a communications channel.

I don't recall Bell having this issue.

Only "you" and "3rd person" are individuals in this story. "I" is not an individual but a giant multibillion dollar corporation with vast reach that has swayed elections in the past. Not just some dude relaying a message.

Wikipedia definition of censorship:

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

What Facebook did fits the definition of censorship perfectly - they suppressed the story.

Because there aren’t enough examples of it in recent history or just to be edgy?

Reality is hard and difficult to navigate.

Hang in there.

You can read a lot, form your own opinion and then stick to it, in a bayesian way (adjusting your view based on new information).

This may help you not feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of reality.

And yes, Russia interfered in American election. Yes, they try to weaken western democracies. No, they are not responsible for everything wrong in America today.

If the question were Was it reasonable to suppress the laptop story? this would be an excellent answer. The question I asked is:

If you rely, for your mental picture of what is... important and what can be dismissed, on the same institutions that suppress true stories and promote false ones, then how even are you making these choices?

Hunter turned out to be mostly a non-story [1] in practice but the FBI silencing his laptop story makes every partisan person in the country immediately think there's something they are trying to hide. Especially when it comes out they already had access to the laptop data before the suppression of the information, so they knew it was real.

I don't blame them for thinking it's a big deal. They Streisand'd it into the biggest deal possible.

[1] besides people who find rich kids being fuck-ups damaging to the parent, but he wasn't politically involved like other politicians children and there wasn't much tangible beyond that

If the question were Is Trump actually a unique evil? this would be an excellent answer. The question I asked is:

If you rely, for your mental picture of what is... important and what can be dismissed, on the same institutions that suppress true stories and promote false ones, then how even are you making these choices?

It's buried in my own verbiage, but this is the thrust of my reply.

If you rely, for your mental picture of what is ... important and what can be dismissed, on the same institutions that suppress true stories and promote false ones, then how even are you making these choices?

At the risk of distracting you from answering that question, I'll answer yours: partisan feuding is destroying the US, so I absolutely put country before party. Moreover, I actively seek out, listen to and even respect people with whom I disagree. Corruption is corruption, whether it's "my guy" or "their guy".

My skepticism of the media didn't quite reach the level it should have at the time.

> But the news said it was Russian misinformation.

And pushing the story was Russian misinformation, peddled via Rudy. Weird how trump world folks keep pushing Russian ops.

It’s relevance is for the American voter to decide, not the FBI or Zuckerberg.

The best part is that the attempted suppression only sheds even more light on it.

But it was a true story? You don’t want to hear about true bad things if they are about people you like?

The only point of the Steele dossier paid for by Hillary was to smear Trump. Should that story also have been censored? It was provably full of fake information.

As I read the article, it doesn't suggest the FBI knew the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true at the time, so the claim that they were "suppressing true stories," while technically correct, is a disingenuous framing of events.

It seems the FBI didn't order Facebook to suppress that story specifically, rather they warned Facebook generally about misinformation and propaganda, and Facebook (along with everyone else) decided of their own volition to suppress the story about the laptop. A story which, we both admit, was surrounded by a cloud of misinformation regardless of the kernel of truth in the middle. So they weren't even entirely wrong to do so on that account.

You could say that Facebook and the media were caught up in something of a moral panic about disinformation at the time, and overreacted, and I might agree.

And again - this wasn't information about a candidate. As far as I know, the only link to Joe Biden is that Hunter Biden introduced a Russian businessman to him when he was Vice President. That's hardly Watergate.

I thought the FBI had the laptop. How are all these other people claiming to have copies of the hard drive?

More than that, there is evidence of tampering with the data on the drive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...

> In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

> Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

The things that happened and were said by Trump during his presidency was so unfathomably bad that I don't think the US will recover its status abroad for a long time. It doesn't matter who gets to be president next. The fact that a grifting Russia-owned mobster with an equally grifting family got elected to the highest office in (arguably) the world, is still hard to believe to this day.

Is there any evidence of that actually happening?

To me the simplest explanation is Hunter Biden was selling the perception of proximity to Joe Biden. Which is skeevy but IMO doesn’t reflect on Joe Biden as anything except a shitty father.

This is an odd statement I'm having trouble following on basically every level.

1. the article clearly states the FBI did not specifically mention the Biden story.

2. It's odd to then claim they followed the FBI's suggestion to "buy good will" on other fronts. (Unclear how FBI goodwill would help, if your statement about Facebook "fearing regulation the most" is true).

3. Regardless, the FBI is part of the executive branch - it does not prosecute nor regulate. On a related point, the FBI is alleged (not necessarily proven) to be right/conservative-leaning. So it's a strange suggestion the FBI were trying to somehow pressure Facebook to censor anti-Biden media, at least based on what we know about the agency. It could be true, but would require some backing evidence as the FBI is "supposed" to be apolitical, but if anything it has been criticized for leaning conservative.

4. You single out "Companies like Facebook" as the issue, but the article states the Washington Post and New York Times actually tried to imply the New York Post article and emails were false (only to later acknowledge "some" emails were authentic).

It's not clear to me that social media restricting an article is the primary issue, vs. prominent news outlets which are trusted as a primary source by millions of voters, claiming an article was disinformation, only later to actually perform an investigation and acknowledge it was true.

Both things of course are highly problematic. But it seems reasonable to assume if the major news outlets didn't claim the story was disinformation, it would've been less likely to have been incorrectly censored as disinformation by social media platforms who were warned by the FBI about Russian disinformation.

They didn't do that here, though. Please read the article–the FBI talked to Facebook prior to Rudy's disinformation campaign around the laptop, and Facebook realized it (correctly) had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, and chose not to amplify its reach (they didn't ban the story entirely).

The difference to me is in the nature of coercion and interaction between law enforcement and Facebook. Was Facebook given general guidance and warning about the likelihood of misinformation, which they chose to act upon, and could otherwise have chosen not to act upon? Or were they given direct orders to sink this specific story under threat of violence or sanction?

> The FBI telling Facebook "This is False Information, Censor it" absolutely violates many peoples first amendment rights by way of Tortious interference.

But that isn't what happened, according to the article. So even if you're correct, it doesn't apply in this case.

The FBI warned about general election misinformation. They did not mention or direct FB re: this specific story. That was FB's choice.

No it isn't. The FBI said "hey heads up there is likely to be a lot of interference and misinformation for this election" and then considerably later facebook goes "hey this story looks like it fits the pattern the FBI told us about" and took independent action.

A government official can block you. The office of government official cannot block you. As a general rule, objects in the Constitution (such as a press, personal things and affects etc) are understood to be defined by their function not by their form. Eg, 4th Amendment protection extends to your private correspondences via phone call despite no paper correspondence being present. Yes your hypothetical Facebook blocking situation is explicitly in the Constitution so long as you accept Facebook is a printing-press-by-way-of-function. If you refuse this minimal fair rule of interpretation, the Constitution is hopelessly stuck in the late 1700s.

He was also on the Tim Ferriss podcast recently: https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/

It's all about perspective. I think, unpopularly but based on objectivity and rationality, that oil companies are great and have done a world a lot of good – literally everything we do today from modern medicine to farming depends on fossil fuels, it has sustained 8 billion people on this planet and saved countless lives. Without it, we would see horror of death like you've never witnessed, millions of people would die. This whole thing is a matter of perspective, like a russian doll illusion. Stare hard enough and it will rotate the other way.

You can similarly see social media in two ways. Zuckerberg also gets disproportionate amount of hate compared to other media. Who's the CEO of Tiktok?

There is no net positive impact from social networking services, or indeed any other medium powered by advertising where the operators thereof have realized that hatred can be monetized. People have always disagreed with one another and clashed over political views... but only in the last 15 years have people been so polarized, and I think we can directly attribute it to conditioning as a direct result of participation on networks that incentivize people to consume hatred for clicks.

They haven’t. But a eulogy is premature.

2 billions to Jared Kushner evidence /sarcasm.

Btw, I don't recall any other US president having classified and top secrets docs at home after leaving WH.

It's now a NATO security issue, allies should be informed.

Nice way of deflecting blame there. Trump knew exactly what he was doing and he did it. He now got caught. It’s not like “hey nobody told me I couldn’t do this”, it’s why tf are you taking these documents sir. There’s no interpretation of reality which makes that an accident or oversight.

Yes he did hide the documents. Read the actual affidavit and the 20 month timeline

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/26/us/trump-sear...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/politics/trump-documen...

It was not accident: Trump claims it's his right to keep his records and even publicly displayed some of them for prestige after demands for their return began. Some "accident"!

It was not CYA: The National Archives and DoJ spent 20 months exhausting all legal means to force the return of the documents to a safe facility. Trump's people according to the facts had around 16 months of escalating demands to actually do the return. Had they returned the documents during any of the many, many demands spanning multiple escalating agencies, it would have been a "no harm no foul" situation and no one would know.

When they finally returned some of the documents, it became evident that there were many more missing and the matter was referred to the DoJ. The DoJ Investigated, escalated and demanded the return.

And even then, surveillance footage shows documents being removed from the room to an unknown location. Despite there being two remaining groups of missing documents, Trump's lawyers signed a document saying there were no documents left (this is obstruction of justice multiple times -- hiding docs after the subpoena, lying about it, etc).

This is when the situation went from "maybe accident" to "definitely a serious crime". The FBI absolutely knew there were more documents, the former President was openly lying about it in court, AND there was a potential second additional unsecured cache of documents that had seen being removed on surveillance.

This is when we get to the search warrant, the final and last straw in a 20 month long quest to return some of the most highly classified secrets possible. And even now after the seizure they do not have all the documents.

>You have no evidence whatever to back up this claim.

Ironic statement from someone arguing directly against the facts while making up narratives like "it was an accident, it was CYA" which Trump himself openly denies. But that's normal for those who defend Trump to find that he has publicly undercut their narratives.

Seriously, it's all in the doc above.

But if we want to think beyond the actual legal filing, consider this article from the NYT ~9 months after the theft of top secret information that we know was classified in a way to protect the identities of American agents abroad. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informant...

No they didn’t are you all in some kind of reality distortion field? At least read the article.

I'd very much like to be able to give you a more definite answer, but the problem is that I saw a lot of people self-censor around a lot of topics, only some of them political. It's possible that people were afraid of peer-censure, it's possible that they were afraid of official retaliation (though I never saw such a thing), and it's possible that they just didn't want to create trouble for themselves in some vague sense. Few people want to pick a fight with all their colleagues after all.

I worked for big tech in SFBA and NYC: the median of rank-and-file people like me were at a place on the political/social/cultural spectrum that would be called "extreme" in my region of origin (Southern California). And there clearly isn't a bright line between "contributor" and "leadership". And there clearly isn't a bright line between "find this person distasteful" and "pass them over for opportunity". I can absolutely picture that right-leaning folks would have felt outnumbered and/or disinclined to speak freely, I absolutely cannot picture leadership sanctioning career damage over it.

I supported/managed a high-impact group in a critical niche of about 35 people at my maximum seniority. If anyone had gotten held back for a promotion or something because of supporting a liberal or conservative candidate politically I would have come down like the wrath of God on that, and I believe my superiors would have backed that all the way.

I appreciate that's a lot of "believe" and "think" and "imagine", but it's just impossible for me to prove a negative, so I've tried to answer with some nuance and at some length to convey a useful intuition.

The media doesn't "lean left or right" for the most part. The media acts as a magnifying glass to foment public opinion. The father of modern journalism Walter Lippmann penned a book about this very thing literally 100 years ago (also it's in the public domain now, it's a great read!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

To even imply MSNBC is "left leaning" is absolutely hilarious however. Though I suppose people so easily forget their Nazi comparison of Bernie Sanders

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-03-03/ty-article/msnbc-...

You are trying to make the point I was anticipating.

One might have been a supporter of someone like Trump or Cuomo for all kinds of reasons, but for many it's simply over once a certain line is crossed.

As I said, it is a difficult point to argue against because their transgressions concern what many consider really basic values.

No, this is not what happened. The only true part of the story is that a laptop exists.

There is evidence that the hard drives were manipulated on it. There's no evidence Hunter put any of the data on the hard drive there. And beyond all that, nothing there shows Joe Biden did anything wrong.

Even the guy who _found_ the laptop doesn't think the information on it is necessarily legitimate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/12/now-warni...