Facebook’s election integrity expert formerly worked as a special adviser for European policy to Joe Biden while he served as vice president.
Anna Makanju is currently a “legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to ensure election integrity on the platform,” according to her Atlantic Council biography. Before that, she was the “special policy adviser for Europe and Eurasia to former US Vice President Joe Biden.”
Leading up to the 2018 midterms, Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council to “boost its election security efforts.”
Facebook came under scrutiny last week after the social media giant moved to reduce the distribution of a New York Post story claiming recovered emails on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden linked Joe Biden to a meeting with an executive of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that employed the younger Biden.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
“This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review,” he added.
In a 2019 Washington Post story, Makanju defended her former boss’s actions in Ukraine, saying she listened to calls the former vice president had with Ukrainian leadership and Burisma never came up.
“Burisma was just not significant enough,” she told the Post.
Shortly after Facebook took action to limit the story’s reach, Twitter followed suit.
“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy,” Twitter posted in a message to users trying to share the story.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment.
