Sniffed CEO Chris Richmond said on Saturday that the US government was to blame for the censorship Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and claimed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acted in accordance with the administration at the time.
“Let’s look at the most famous example of Facebook censoring content, which was the Hunter Biden laptop story. And we say, well, fact-checking, right, who told Zuckerberg to limit the reach of that? No, it was So, Facebook complied with the government, and then the fact-checkers are to blame,” Richmond told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company would end its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram.
“If Kamala Harris had won, would he have taken any of these same actions now? No. He went along with what the government wanted then and now he’s doing what the new administration wants,” Richmond said.
Snopes CEO Chris Richmond told MSNBC that the government is to blame for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, not the fact-checkers.
TRUMP SAYS META ‘TRAVELED FAR’ AFTER ZUCKERBERG ENDED PLATFORM FACT CHECKING
the New York Post reported a report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 that was effectively buried by Big Tech, including Twitter and Facebook.
Zuckerberg said he wants to launch a program similar to Elon Musk’s X community notes, which Richmond said is a good system in theory.
“I agree that the community notes system is great. It should be transparent. The problem is that Facebook has this black box system where they can do whatever they want and just shift the blame, like we want a more transparent system. We should be pushing for community notes, but to say you’re going to remove fact-checkers as part of the process, I think that’s a problem,” he added.
Zuckerberg spoke to the podcast host Joe Rogan in an episode aired Friday, in which the executive shared that members of the Biden administration regularly demanded that they take down social media posts about the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Facebook target and founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken at length about the pressure he has faced from the government, particularly the Biden administration, to censor content on their behalf. (The Joe Rogan Experience)
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MEDIA AND CULTURE REPORTING
Zuckerberg went on to talk about “government censorship,” which he says is largely covered by a congressional investigation, where he said, “I mean, actually these people from the Biden administration would call our team and they’d kind of scream at them and swear at them, and is like… these documents are, everything is kind of there.”
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Zuckerberg summarized that the conflict between his company and the government “basically got to this point where we said, ‘No, we won’t, we won’t take down things that are true.’ That’s ridiculous.”
Fox News’ Alex Hall contributed to this report
