Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg: Your letter to Jim Jordan isn’t remotely the end of the story on Facebook censorship, past or future; indeed it raises more questions.
For now, we’ll focus on the suppression of The Post’s Hunter Biden scoops in the runup to the 2020 election.
You now regret that, but to truly atone, you need to release internal files and emails exposing exactly how your staff caved into pressure, just as Elon Musk did with the Twitter Files.
There’s a heck of lot we still don’t know about what went on — and we were the ones your company targeted.
First, some basic facts: Our first laptop story went up on The Post’s website at 5 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020.
At 11:10 a.m., Facebook communications chief Andy Stone tweeted: “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
The Post immediately reached out to our regular FB reps, asking, “Can you confirm if this is true? If so, can you explain why?” and asking for “a call ASAP to discuss this.”
Facebook got back two days later, claiming it was simply enforcing longstanding policy; the stories “will have their distribution reduced pending review by a third-party fact-checker.”
We immediately wrote back, “How long should we expect this process to take? And if the fact-checkers don’t find any falsehoods, will the distribution of the stories be restored to normal?”
We’re still waiting for an answer on that.
Meanwhile, despite Facebook’s reduction of the stories’ distribution, the first three laptop articles got roughly 1.7 million views from people who clicked on a Facebook link to them.
But, for context, The Post’s total “clicks” from Facebook fell 28% in October-November 2020 from the August-September level.
That strongly suggests that the suppression had a major impact: Without it, our “FB traffic” surely would’ve seen a major jump.
Coming up on four years later, we still haven’t seen the results of that supposed “third-party fact-check,” though of course a vast pack of outfits from Politico to The New York Times eventually admitted that we were right on everything.
Was there ever actually a check for Facebook? Who was the third party? Does Meta have any data on how extensive the suppression was?
Actually, here’s a list of topics that outside investigators should resolve:
1) Share all the relevant communications up to and on the day of us publishing the laptop story. Not just the FBI warnings about Russian disinfo on Hunter, but all the “private sector” ones too.
We know now that many “private” outfits declaring themselves experts were funded by branches of the US government and the UK Labour party, plus plenty the politically partisan “dark money.”
2) How long did the demotion last and exactly how many voters would likely have seen it if it wasn’t suppressed?
This should include the numbers of people trying to share it.
3) When did it actually go to fact-checkers?
4) Who were the fact-checkers and what were their partisan affiliations?
5) Why did Facebook ignore our protestations, not just in those first days but in the long term, too?
6) While the story itself was suppressed, we also know that in doing so, all of our content and that of conservative outlets sharing it was also downgraded for a much longer period of time.
We want full details on those decisions, too — complete with insight into the communication behind them, and the scale and impact of the downgrades.
Finally, 7) Explain why no center-right leaning outfit has ever been approved as a Facebook fact-checker.
When Musk gave independent journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss access to Twitter’s internal files, they exposed a vast web of government-driven censorship, often working through private-sector and nonprofit cutouts — with, for example, “content moderation” that suppressed regular Americans’ speech on the pretext that they were Russian bots and “visibility filtering” that shut down eminent scientists questioning COVID policy.
We appreciate what the Meta CEO has already admitted, and that he really wants to move on. But running a major media company comes with certain obligations to the public, and Zuck has a long way to go to fulfill his duties.
