CEO of left-leaning fact-checker says government at fault for censoring Hunter Biden laptop, not fact-checkers

Snopes CEO Chris Richmond said Saturday that the U.S. government was to blame for the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, and argued that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was complying with the administration at the time.

"Let's look at the most famous example of Facebook censoring content, and that was the Hunter Biden laptop story. And we say, well, it was fact-checkers, right, who told Zuckerberg to limit the reach of that? No, it was the government. So, Facebook complied with the government, and then the fact-checkers get the blame," Richmond told MSNBC's Ali Velshi on Saturday.

Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company would be ending its fact-check program on Facebook and Instagram. 

"If Kamala Harris would have won, would he be taking any of these same actions now? No. He complied with what the government wanted then and is complying what the new administration wants now," Richmond said.

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The New York Post published a report on the Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020 that was effectively buried by Big Tech, including Twitter and Facebook. 

Zuckerberg said he wanted to institute a program similar to Elon Musk's community notes on X, which Richmond said was a good system in theory.

"I agree that the community note system is great. It should be transparent. The problem is that Facebook has this black box system that they can do what they want and just pass off the blame, like we want a more transparent system. We should be pushing to community notes. But to say that you’re going to remove fact-checkers as part of the process, I think that’s where the issue is," he added. 

Zuckerberg spoke to podcast host Joe Rogan in an episode posted on Friday, where the CEO shared that members of the Biden administration regularly demanded they take down social media posts about side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine.

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Zuckerberg spoke further about the "government censorship," much of which he says has been covered by the congressional investigation, where he said, "I mean basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse, and it's like… these documents are, it's all kind of out there."

Zuckerberg summarized that the conflict between his company and the government "basically got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we're not going to, we're not going to take down things that are true.' That's ridiculous."

Fox News' Alex Hall contributed to this report