Mark Zuckerberg denied censoring the New York Post’s bombshell story on alleged links between the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, despite the fact that Facebook cut visibility on the story across its platform to less than half of that enjoyed by anti-Trump stories in the corporate media.
Zuckerberg also claimed that the Post’s distribution was limited pending a decision from fact-checkers, but the Poynter Institute, which accredits Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers, disagrees, saying the tech giant did not follow the usual protocol.
“To be clear on this, we didn’t censor the content, we flagged it for fact checkers to review, and, pending that review, we temporarily constrained its distribution to make sure it didn’t spread wildly while it was being reviewed,” Zuckerberg told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
The exchange took place during a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on the issue of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that shields Big Tech from most legal consequences over censoring content. Zuckerberg appeared alongside Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai.
Despite denying that he censored the New York Post, analysis from the social media analytics firm Newswhip shows that the Post’s story’s reach on Facebook was cut in half compared to recent anti-Trump “scandals” published by the corporate media.
As Breitbart News’ Lucas Nolan reported:
The data on the story’s engagement across social media compiled by Newswhip shows that roughly 1.94 million people engaged with the Post’s story in the first 24 hours after it was published. As of Sunday, around 2.12 million readers had engaged with the story.
But, by comparison, when the Atlantic published a story which alleged that President Trump referred to fallen soldiers as “losers and suckers,” 3.69 million readers engaged with the story on Facebook in the first 24 hours As of Sunday, 6.86 million people had read the story. The New York Times article on the President’s tax returns received around 4.12 million engagements in the first 24 hours while 5.37 million have read it as of Sunday. The New York Times story on Trump’s taxes also had engagement numbers similar to the Atlatnic’s Trump smear. Unlike the Biden bombshell, Facebook did not publicly say that it would suppress or otherwise influence the engagement of the anti-Trump stories.
Breitbart News will continue to report on Facebook’s censorship and election meddling.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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