Facebook’s reaction to Hunter Biden laptop story shows FBI uses ‘disinformation’ as a weapon

Now we know why social-media sites rushed to suppress The Post’s bombshell series on Hunter Biden’s laptop: The FBI primed them to expect “Russian disinformation” on that exact topic — and Facebook execs wanted to earn brownie points with the presumably-incoming Harris-Biden administration.

Facebook employee chat logs, revealed in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, show that the FBI laid the groundwork for censorship by warning social-media sites that Russian agents were supposedly prepping “fake news” on Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

So when The Post’s reporting on the laptop went live, one Facebook employee dismissed it out of hand as the “exact content expected for hack and leak.”

This was nearly a full year after another part of the FBI had internally authenticated the Hunter laptop as real, info the agency accidentally shared with some Twitter staff but seemingly didn’t give Facebook.

With most other major media also taking the “misinformation” line (rather than competing to report out the story themselves, as they did with the actual disinfo of the fake “Russiagate” scandal), Facebook and Twitter actively squelched our reporting.

META CEO Mark Zuckerberg later admitted suppressing the story was the wrong move, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey also expressed regrets.

Yet the chat also showed that Facebook’s higher-ups were determined to stay in Harris-Biden’s good graces, with one top exec, Nick Clegg (the former had of a left-wing British political party), telling another: “Obviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”

Pretty shameful for a media company that claims to care about its users.

But the FBI seeding doubt about a story the bureau knew was true is more proof that the “anti-disinformation industrial complex” is a prolific spreader of disinformation.

One with a blatant political bias, as witness the federally-subsidized Global Disinformation Index’s “blacklists” of conservative publications to the FBI encouraging social-media sites to target right-wing accounts for suspension or removal.

And the rank politicization also extends to the US intelligence community: Witness the 51 “spies who lied” (at the Biden campaign’s request!) by signing a letter blasting the laptop stories as an evident “Russian information operation” — and then refused to apologize when they were proved dead wrong.

The more our high-minded “best and brightest” claim to be protecting us from “bad” information, the more they turn out to have their own interests at heart.