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Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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