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XCabbage01/21/20251 replyview on HN

Oh, come on. No, per the reporting, they didn't specifically mention the laptop, but they DID tell SM and tech companies to expect an imminent disinformation dump the week before the NYP published their story (which they'd been sitting on while working on verifying it), and gave enough of a characterisation of what that specific impending dump would contain that employees of the warned companies sent each other messages affirming that, yes, this was clearly the dump the FBI had warned them about. Then when they asked the FBI if this was indeed the Russian misinformation they'd just warned about, the FBI didn't deny it.

(Right? I have no insider information, here, but as far as I understand it none of the above is controversial.)

I don't know the exact content of the messages the FBI sent (I don't think they've been published), but on its face it seems perverse to me to characterise that sequence of events as the FBI not saying "anything about the Hunter laptop story" to Facebook. They presumably were referring to the Hunter laptop story, and Facebook correctly recognised that this was the case when the story broke, so in what sense are was the warning not "about" that story?


Replies

blactuary01/21/2025

They didn't tell them to censor anything, they warned them that misinformation was coming, and FB on their own decided to temporarily suppress it from "Trending" before changing their mind. You're free to read all of the evidence. Zuck lied and tried to conflate the Instagram bug with the laptop story and/or the COVID stuff