During a portion of an interview aired on Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Meta President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg responded to a question on if Facebook manipulated or censored the Hunter Biden laptop story and stories about the origins of COVID by stating that they decreased the prominence of the laptop story for seven days so their fact-checkers could “look at the story if they wanted to. They didn’t.”
Host Bret Baier asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:05] “[A]s far as stories, the Hunter Biden laptop story, the story of the COVID origins, did Facebook manipulate those or censor those as they were coming out?”
Clegg responded, “So, on the Hunter Biden story, other platforms, I think it was Twitter, sort of just deleted the story altogether. We didn’t. You could still find the story. Millions of people did. But for seven days the prominence of the story was less for those seven days. It’s just part of the way our systems work to allow our fact-checkers, we have a network of independent fact-checkers to look at the story if they wanted to. They didn’t. And after seven days, that — what’s called in the jargon — that temporary demotion was taken off. So, we didn’t remove it. People could find it. Many people saw it on Facebook. We were simply following the rules by which our systems currently operate.”
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