Mark Zuckerberg admitted recently that Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden lap story ahead of the
2020 election. He says, we throttled it back. He says that, actually, he didn't really say that in
the interview. You and I talked about this. Yeah.
If you look at the Rogan interview, I, I think they've taken and, and I agree with what you and I
had talked about earlier, it's almost like they're putting, they're adding
some words to this whole thing, aren't they? Yeah, they are. And there's a lot that's real with
this story. There's a lot that's unreal. First and foremost, let's talk about the big thing,
he goes on Joe Rogan and Zuckerberg clearly says, and we, we, we actually do have the clip.
Mm-hmm. So Zuckerberg says, I think the FBI
may have reached out to some people. There's so many vague words in there. And then of course,
Rogan asked point blank, did they tell you to, to censor the Hunter Biden story? And he
said point blank, no. Yeah, yeah.
No, they didn't. But they still did make the decision to throttle that
particular story. He admits that freely. Well, they throttle, they didn't kill it.
Right. They throttled it back. They said,
look, we got, you know, there's, there's an edge of a warning here. Somebody is saying that the
Russians are coming again and the Russians are gonna put all this propaganda out there. Now
here's what's developing to me. I, I don't know whether you're following this. I think we talked
about it earlier. This Timothy Thibault. Now I think this is, this is a big part of the story.
The Hill reported that he was the guy that was in charge of the Hunter Biden investigation. And
he was the guy that, that made the decisions. Do we go forward? Do we do this? Do we follow
the investigation? What do we do? He, he was escorted out of the FBI building a couple of
weeks ago. Okay. Now he had been on suspension before then for investigating him to say, did you
really do what the media is saying, some media is saying that you did? That you interfered with
social media so you could cover up the Hunter Biden story. What's your, what is your take.
Well, and you had. What's your take?
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is basically the one who lobbed all these allegations against
Thibault. And they did investigate, suspended while investigating, not suspended, I guess,
because there was definite wrongdoing, but saying, because you're being investigated for these
allegations, we need you to step aside. And then of course he quits, retires, you know, differing
stories everywhere about why he actually left. Mm-hmm.
But, okay, so he's gone now. This guy who was running it, he obviously didn't kill the
investigation because it was still happening. Right.
But, I guess the question is, was there damage done? Did you intentionally
sabotage anything? Which is a legit question. Take, take, take the election out of it. Okay.
Take the Trump election and Hunter Biden and people say, well, if we'd have known the story,
we wouldn't have voted for Biden. First of all, I don't think any of this ties up directly to Biden.
Right. You and I talked about this. You
pointed out that most of this took, 2017, 2018. Right. From August, 2017 to October
of 2018 is when these deals happened. So let's assume that Hunter Biden is the, the
dirtbag that he is. He is a total utter dirtbag. No question about it. But how does that tie up to
the president? And I don't think anybody, nobody's come forward and said, yeah, this is where it's
very clear. What, what the big problem here is the FBI. The FBI has been so tarnished. I mean, not,
not just from this, but for four or five stories before this they've been tarnished.
I don't think they're ultimately, I don't think they're gonna be tarnished by the raid that,
or that took place down at Mar-a-Lago. I just don't think that's gonna be a problem for 'em. But
right now they are, they know that they are having to fight this image problem. People are saying,
this is starting to look like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. That's when the Republicans were in charge
of saying to the FBI, go investigate this person, go after this person's tax issues, go invest. The
Republicans were driving the train. The, the FBI was politically a machine for the GOP. Now the
question is, has the FBI become a machine for, for the Democrats? I, to me, it kills the FBI
if this comes out, if this continues to unfold the way it seems to be unfolding. What's your take?
Which could be why Thibault, you know, retired, you know, maybe he,
it wasn't a voluntary decision. Maybe it was, you need to get outta here. We've gotta maintain this
reputation. We've gotta make sure everything is on the level. We clearly have a lot of other things
going on as well. Mm-hmm.
And if there is any kind of blemish on this investigation,
it's gonna put blemishes on everything else we're doing. So maybe they forced him out. Again, we,
we don't know, we're not inside there. But for him to abruptly say, okay, I'm officially
retiring right now. You're handling this massive investigation. It's bad optics to say the least.
Yeah, it's bad optics. And you know what happened when the GOP was involved with, with J. Edgar
Hoover and Hoover was a weapon. That's all he was. Yeah.
He was a little, you know, little weapon that they would send out against their political
foes. Now they, and then, and the Democrats moved during the Church
hearings and all that process, they moved to start cutting back the funds of the FBI.
I, I predict the same thing's gonna happen here. There's already cries, defund the FBI. I don't
believe that's gonna happen, but I think they're gonna have a hard time getting big funding.
Well, you know, and I do think when we talk about this Hunter Biden story, because,
you know, you mentioned the guy being a scumbag and that's based on all the photos and everything
we've seen off the laptop, but when it comes right down to actual criminal activity here,
we're still lacking a lot of evidence. You know, he did some weird things in those pictures.
Yeah. A hundred percent. But
right now you've looked at it, I've looked at it. We're struggling to put anything that looks,
unethical, yes. Yeah, yeah.
Criminal, not seeing it yet. It's the appearance, what they would
say the appearance of impropriety. But I mean, the guy is a dirtbag. I mean, but he's a dirtbag
that I don't believe at this point has committed any criminal offense that ties back to his dad.
Yeah. And that's the importance of the story.
I mean, I don't care that, you know, the guy's a dirtbag. There are plenty of dirtbags around.
How do you guys handle things when they're a big news item that's controversial?
Like there was a lot of attention on Twitter during the election because of the Hunter Biden
laptop story. The New York Post. Yeah. We had that too.
Yeah. So you guys censored that as well? So we took a different path than Twitter. Um,
I mean basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us, some,
some folks on our team and was like, hey, um, just so you know, like you should be on high alert.
There was the, we, we thought that 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 of, of um,
uh, that's similar to that. So just be vigilant. So our protocol is different from Twitters. What
Twitter did is they said you can't share this at all. Um, we didn't do that. What we do is we have,
um, if something is reported to us as potentially, um, misinformation, important misinformation, we,
we also do this third party fact checking program because we don't wanna be deciding what's true
and false. And for the, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being, um,
being determined, whether it was false, um, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people
were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it. You could still consume it. Um.
When you say the distribution is decreased and. It, it got shared.
How does that work? It basically the ranking and
newsfeed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would've otherwise. So it definitely.
By what percentage? I, I don't know off the top of my head, but it's,
it's, it's meaningful. But I mean, but basically a um, a lot of people were still able to share it.
We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. Um, you know, obviously this is a hyper political
issue. So depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn't censor it
enough or censored it way too much, but. Right.
But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as, as Twitter, we just kind of thought,
hey look, if, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country,
it's a very professional law enforcement. They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard
about something then I wanna take that seriously. Did they specifically say you need to be
on guard about that story? I, I, no. I don't remember
if it was that specifically, but it was, it basically fit the pattern.