Joe Rogan asked Mark Zuckerberg if he had “censored” Hunter Biden’s laptop story. The CEO took the opportunity to defend the FBI as a “legitimate institution.”

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he views the FBI as a “legitimate institution.”
• He told Joe Rogan that the FBI had advised him to be wary of polarizing content around the 2020 election.
• Far-right GOP members have called for the FBI to relieve the burden after it raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents.

Facebook, now Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks the FBI is a “legitimate institution” amid far-right GOP figures calling for the agency to pay back after the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-law residence. Lago.

During a 3-hour segment on podcaster Joe Rogan’s program, Rogan asked Zuckerberg how his company handles content that has a lot of news, such as the controversial New York Post story in late 2020 about President Joe Biden’s son’s laptop. Hunter Biden, and if Facebook “censored that too.”

Zuckerberg said the FBI had already approached his company and warned them to watch out for polarizing content, just as Russian propaganda made the platform its home base around the 2016 US presidential election.

“We just thought, ‘Hey look, if the FBI — which I still consider a legitimate institution in this country, it’s very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us to watch out for something, then I want to take that seriously,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.

Zuckerberg said it was taking a different approach to Twitter and not banning users from sharing the NY Post story. Facebook users could still share it, but the story appeared less in people’s NewsFeed, meaning it got less traffic.

“‘We’ve been informed that there will be some sort of landfill similar to that, so be vigilant,'” the FBI told Facebook, according to Zuckerberg, who noted he couldn’t remember if they had warned him specifically about the NY Post office. story, but thought the story “fitted the pattern”.

The NY Post story was published just a few months before the divisive 2020 US presidential election and became a favorite talking point for conservatives who claim big internet companies discriminate against them.

Twitter banned the URL of his site’s story, a move that then-CEO Jack Dorsey said was “wrong”.

Earlier this month, the FBI obtained a federal search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to determine whether he had mishandled classified government documents. The New York Times reported Monday that the administration has recovered 300 documents bearing Trump’s markings since he left office in January 2021, including documents seized by the FBI.

Pro-Trump figures like Georgie Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar argued for the return of the FBI, in contrast to conservatives’ long-standing efforts to push back the left’s plans to downgrade the police force.