"Distribution on Facebook was decreased" - Mark Zuckerberg reveals on Joe Rogan's podcast that Hunter Biden's laptop controversy was censored after FBI request 

Speaking on episode #1863 of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Meta Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the distribution of content related to the Hunter Biden laptop controversy was limited on Facebook at the request of the FBI.

The Facebook founder said that the FBI asked the social networking platform to be on high alert as false, sensitive news usually crept up during the presidential elections:

"The background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us, to some folks in our team. It was like 'hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert... We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 elections. We have it on notice that basically there is about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that.'"

Zuckerberg explained to Joe Rogan that instead of shutting out all content related to the laptop controversy, Facebook decided to limit its distribution until the news was validated:

"Our protocol is different to Twitter. What Twitter did is they said you can't share this at all. We didn't do that... For the, I think it was five to seven days when it was basically being determined whether it [laptop controversy] was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased. But people were still allowed to share it."

Watch the clip below:

Hunter Biden's laptop controversy initially surfaced in October 2020 before the US presidential elections.

The controversy began when the New York Post published many of Biden's controversial texts and emails. The publication reportedly received the data from a shop owner who claimed to have received three laptops of Hunter Biden's for repairs.

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Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan some parameters with which Facebook authenticates pages

During the same JRE episode, the Meta Inc. CEO said that the overall prevalence and the authenticity of a page or content factor into it being subjected to censorship on the social networking platform.

The tech magnate told Joe Rogan that, especially for large pages, Facebook makes sure to know who's running the page to authenticate it as not being a bot-run page:

"One of the things we do for large pages, we try to make sure that we know who the admin of that page is... We want to make sure that we sort of have like an identity for that person on file. So that we know atleast behind the scenes [even for anonymous pages] that person is real [and not a bot]."

The Facebook founder added that for political news, the country of origin is also a factor in letting the page stay up on the platform:

"For certain political things, having a sense of what country they are originating from [is a factor]... If it's like an ad in some other country's election then you probably want to make sure that, that ad is, especially in countries that have laws around that, are coming from a person who is a valid citizen."

Watch Mark Zuckerberg tell Joe Rogan about weeding out non-authentic FB pages below: