Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyokodo | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Everything you said here is false

No, it is true and has been covered in all major newspapers many times over. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored due to warnings from the FBI, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that Facebook was pressured by the Biden administration to censor Covid-19-related content.

The FBI did not say anything about the Hunter laptop story to Facebook, they warned all social media companies that they had detected suspicious activity and that the companies should be aware of foreign disinformation ops

The laptop story was always nonsense anyway, because the chain of custody of the laptop was compromised, and forensic analysis of the hard drive showed that the contents had been modified after it was retrieved from the repair shop and so the content could not be trusted

Oh, come on. No, per the reporting, they didn't specifically mention the laptop, but they DID tell SM and tech companies to expect an imminent disinformation dump the week before the NYP published their story (which they'd been sitting on while working on verifying it), and gave enough of a characterisation of what that specific impending dump would contain that employees of the warned companies sent each other messages affirming that, yes, this was clearly the dump the FBI had warned them about. Then when they asked the FBI if this was indeed the Russian misinformation they'd just warned about, the FBI didn't deny it.

(Right? I have no insider information, here, but as far as I understand it none of the above is controversial.)

I don't know the exact content of the messages the FBI sent (I don't think they've been published), but on its face it seems perverse to me to characterise that sequence of events as the FBI not saying "anything about the Hunter laptop story" to Facebook. They presumably were referring to the Hunter laptop story, and Facebook correctly recognised that this was the case when the story broke, so in what sense are was the warning not "about" that story?

They didn't tell them to censor anything, they warned them that misinformation was coming, and FB on their own decided to temporarily suppress it from "Trending" before changing their mind. You're free to read all of the evidence. Zuck lied and tried to conflate the Instagram bug with the laptop story and/or the COVID stuff

Both of those claims are false, and Facebook's own internal communications showed that they did not censor any covid-related content. SCOTUS ruled that the govt asked them to filter out misinformation without putting any undue pressure on them, and Facebook declined to do so

I already posted the link refuting this nonsense with sources

No? So this whole section on Wikipedia is just false? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Facebook#COVID-1...

(You may be right about the government "pressure" being grossly overstated, I dunno. But the censorship itself happened.)

Also, "this whole section on Wikipedia is just false?" is a very funny sentence

Yes, it is false

Citing Shellenberger, laughable

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo

"Mr Zuckerberg also said his firm briefly "demoted" content relating to Joe Biden's son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 election, after the FBI warned of "a potential Russian disinformation" operation.

It later became clear that this content was not part of such an operation, Mr Zuckerberg said, and it should not have been temporarily taken down."

"Two and a half years ago, he went on Joe Rogan and said that the FBI had warned the company about the potential for hack and leak efforts put forth by the Russians, which Rogan and a whole bunch of people, including the mainstream media, falsely interpreted as “the FBI told us to block the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

Except that’s not what he said. He was asked about the NY Post story (which Facebook never actually blocked, they only — briefly — blocked it from “trending”), and Zuckerberg very carefully worded his answer to say something that was already known, but which people not listening carefully might think revealed something new:

    The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. 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’.

But the fact that the FBI had sent out a general warning to all of social media to be on the lookout for disinfo campaigns like that was widely known and reported on way earlier. The FBI did not comment specifically on the Hunter Biden laptop story, nor did they tell Facebook (or anyone) to take anything down."

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...

"So, first, calling it “censorship” is misleading, because it’s just how you handle violations of your rules, which is why moderation is always a better term for it."

Got any sources that don't go in for such blatant gaslighting?

Musk has been promoting his views and demoting post that he doesn’t agree with.

Well, Musk hypocrisy aside and assuming the scale of this intervention is the same on X as pre-acquisition and assuming it’s as egregious and petty as then, he won’t have the infrastructure to force his views across all social networks like the Biden administration did.

meta =/= x

> The good news is that Facebook, X, and the Trump administration have publicly committed to, and signed executive orders to unravel that censorship complex.

Do you have proof of this? My feed is catered to how I like it, including posts that disagree with him.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...

https://theconversation.com/tech-billionaire-elon-musks-soci...

Is this a joke comment?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com