So much for Facebook’s claims to be a neutral platform: One of its top execs just put the social media giant firmly in the pro-Biden camp. And Twitter soon followed suit.
Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications manager, boasted about burying The Post’s story on proof that Hunter Biden merchandized access to his dad.
Stone’s tweet Wednesday morning: “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, 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.”
Within hours, Twitter was preventing users from tweeting out the story — with a high-tech trick that let you seem to post it, only to send your tweet into some holding-tank limbo. Its excuse was the supposed “lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials included in the article,” which might — might! — violate its “Hacked Materials Policy.” That The Post made it very clear how the information ended up in the newspaper’s possession didn’t matter.
Censor first, ask questions later: It’s an outrageous attitude for two of the most powerful platforms in the United States to take.
Stone even wears his own bias on his sleeve: The quick biography he posts on Twitter shows his long history of working for Democrats, including lefty former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Though he doesn’t specify what “this story” means, it can only be our scoop on Hunter — emails that show he introduced an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas firm on whose board he sat, to his dad while Joe was vice president.
Biden Sr. has insisted he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” a statement at odds with the massive trove of data recovered from a laptop at a Delaware repair shop.
No one is disputing the veracity of The Post’s story — not even Hunter Biden. His lawyer George R. Mesires wouldn’t deign to comment on the reporting, simply attacking the messenger. The Biden campaign did the same, dismissing it all as “discredited,” while saying carefully that no such meeting showed up on Joe Biden’s official schedule on those dates. (Well, if it wasn’t “official,” guess it didn’t happen.)
As for Twitter’s fear of hacking violations: Our story explains where the info came from, and a Senate committee now confirms it also received the files from the same source.
Yet Facebook and Twitter are deliberately trying to keep its users from reading and deciding for themselves what it means.
This when neither did a thing to restrict access to the recent New York Times story on President Trump’s tax returns. And the Times didn’t say a word about how it obtained that confidential personal data — is there no possible hacking there, Twitter?
An executive of one of the most powerful media platforms in the country, who brags about his years working as a partisan Democratic operative, publicly boasting of his attempt to keep Americans from learning something embarrassing about the Democratic presidential candidate.
And then a major competitor rushes to completely suppress the same story.
Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines.
Story cited here.
