Thirty-five House Republicans, led by Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), published a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today requesting “all documents and communications between October 1, 2020, and the present . . . between or among any employee or contractor of Facebook and any individual affiliated with the FBI” and “the Biden for President campaign or the Democratic National Committee” as it relates to “the New York Post’s reporting about the Biden family.” The letter also requested “all documents and communications between October 1, 2020, and the present” between Facebook and the FBI as it relates to “to purported election misinformation in the 2020 presidential election” and “to Facebook’s plans to implement, or its actions based on, the FBI’s message to be ‘on high alert’ for election misinformation.”
The letter was a response to comments that Zuckerberg, whose Meta conglomerate runs Facebook, made during an interview with Joe Rogan last week. Diana Glebova reports:
Facebook suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election after the FBI told the company they should look out for Russian “misinformation,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan Thursday.
The “distribution” of the bombshell report was suppressed on Facebook for “five or seven” days when it was being determined if the laptop was real, Zuckerberg said, but users could still “share it.”
Facebook engineers downgraded the report within the platform’s “ranking and newsfeed” features, so “fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” he said.
Asked how many fewer users saw the story as a result of the suppression, Zuckerberg said he couldn’t provide an exact number but offered that the effect was “meaningful.”
Facebook decided to suppress the story after the FBI informed executives they should “be on high alert” for Russian “misinformation,” Zuckerberg claimed.
Congressional Republicans have requested information from Facebook about its suppression of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story in the past, but the social-media giant “has never provided complete responses to these letters and, in the months since, has avoided any real accountability for its actions in interfering with election-related public discourse,” today’s letter to Zuckerberg writes. “Government-driven and Big Tech-implemented censorship suppresses freedom of speech and free thought online in ways that harm public discourse. Facebook’s suppression of the Post article—and allegations of Biden family corruption highly relevant to the 2020 presidential election—following guidance from the FBI is highly troubling.”
Jordan posted the full letter on Twitter this morning, writing: “Facebook is on notice.”