Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook restricting a story about Joe Biden's son during the 2020 election was based on FBI misinformation warnings. The New York Post alleged leaked emails from Hunter Biden's laptop showed the then vice-president was helping his son's business dealings in Ukraine. Facebook and Twitter restricted sharing of the article, before reversing course amid allegations of censorship. Zuckerberg said that getting the decision wrong "sucks". "When we take down something that we're not supposed to, that's the worst," Zuckerberg said in a rare extended media interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. The New York Post story was released just weeks before the presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which Mr Biden won. It claimed that a laptop, abandoned in a repair shop by Hunter Biden, contained emails which included details of Hunter introducing a Ukrainian energy tycoon to his father and arranging a meeting. There is no record on Mr Biden's schedule that such a meeting ever took place. Critically, it fed into long-running unproven allegations about corruption on Joe Biden's part to ensure his son's business success in Ukraine. In that context, the New York Post story, based on exclusive data no other news agency had access to, was met with scepticism - and censored by social media outlets. Zuckerberg told Rogan: "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'." He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular - only that Facebook thought it "fit that pattern". Tell-all renews scrutiny of President Biden's son What was Hunter Biden doing in China and Ukraine? The article remains controversial. The hard drive at its centre was provided to the Post by Donald Trump's own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. More than a year after the story appeared, the Washington Post conducted its own analysis and concluded the laptop and some emails were likely to be authentic - but the majority of data could not be verified due to "sloppy handling of the data". Other once-sceptical news organisations such as the New York Times have agreed at least some of the emails are genuine. Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the world with an audience of millions for each episode, has himself been accused of spreading misinformation in the past. Asking Zuckerberg if he regretted suppressing the factual story, the Facebook founder replied: "It sucks... I think in the same way that having to go though a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks... in the end you're free." But Zuckerberg acknowledged that there remained disagreement about the story, which he said was a "hyper-political issue". "Depending on what side of the political spectrum [you're on], you either think we didn't censor it enough or we censored it way too much." Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting. So while people could post the article and discuss it, it was less likely to spread organically to new users. By contrast, Twitter banned sharing of the article at all. Both social media companies found themselves blasted by US Republicans and Donald Trump supporters, and had to explain their actions before a US Senate hearing in the following days. Meta, Facebook's parent company, highlighted that Zuckerberg had addressed the FBI warnings at that 2020 hearing, saying of the Joe Rogan interview that "none of this is new". But in a wide-ranging interview that covered Meta's virtual reality ambitions and Zuckerberg's personal life, the creator of Facebook also talked about his dislike for dealing with such thorny issues. "I didn't get into this to basically judge these things. I got into this to design technology that helps people connect," he told Rogan. "This whole thing that is arbitrating what is OK and what is not - I obviously have to be involved in that because, at some level, I run the company and I can't just abdicate that. "But I also don't think that as a matter of governance you want all of that decision making vested in one individual."--来源BBC
马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）表示，Facebook在2020年大选期间限制关于乔·拜登（Joe Biden）之子的一篇报道，是基于FBI的误信息警告。 《纽约邮报》（New York Post）声称，亨特·拜登（Hunter Biden）的笔记本电脑中泄露的电子邮件显示，时任副总统的拜登帮助其子在乌克兰的商业交易。 Facebook和Twitter限制了该文章的分享，随后在审查制度指控下改弦易辙。 扎克伯格表示，做出错误的决定“很糟糕”。 他在乔·罗根（Joe Rogan）播客上进行了一个罕见的长篇媒体采访时说：“当我们删除了不应删除的内容时，那是最糟糕的。” 《纽约邮报》的报道是在乔·拜登与唐纳德·特朗普之间的总统选举前几周发布的，拜登在选举中胜出。 该报道声称，亨特·拜登在一家修理店遗弃的笔记本电脑中包含电子邮件，包括他安排乌克兰能源大亨与其父亲见面的细节。没有记录表明这种会议真的发生过。 关键是，这进一步证实了关于乔·拜登利用其子在乌克兰的商业成功以确保自己的贪腐指控。尽管这些指控从未得到证实。 在这种背景下，《纽约邮报》的报道，基于其他新闻机构无法获取的独家数据，受到质疑——并被社交媒体平台审查。 扎克伯格告诉罗根：“背景是FBI来找我们——我们团队中的一些人——并说‘嘿，只是让你知道，你应该保持高度警惕。我们认为2016年大选中有很多俄罗斯宣传，我们注意到基本上将有类似的泄密行为’。” 他说，FBI没有就拜登的故事特别警告Facebook——只有Facebook认为它“符合这种模式”。
FBI隶属于司法和情报部门，而非联邦政府机构，对司法部长和情报总监负责。而扎克伯格的陈述，明确表示了FBI基于民主党利益作出了越权行动,意味着执法部门可能受到操纵。那么，民主党对川普的一系列“司法战”被称为“政治迫害”就有了合理的解释。