Everybody should be ‘frightened’ of Big Tech censoring Hunter Biden story: Ian Prior
The former Department of Justice deputy director of public affairs reacts on ‘America’s Newsroom’ to Hunter Biden being under federal investigation.
Facebook and Twitter remained silent Thursday on why they censored the pre-election New York Post bombshell about Hunter Biden, after it was revealed that President-elect Joe Biden's son's foreign business dealings are under federal investigation.
Twitter blocked the sharing of an article about a laptop and emails said to belong to Hunter Biden, and Facebook had limited the distribution of the article, but did not block it entirely. The precedent was quickly mirrored by the mainstream media, which mostly downplayed or ignored the story.
The story shed light on Hunter Biden's questionable business dealings overseas and honchos from both tech giants were called to a Senate Judiciary Committee last month to explain themselves, as Republican lawmakers sought to strip the social media companies of legal protection they enjoy because they are not considered publishers under the law.
On Wednesday, the Biden-Harris transition announced that the younger Biden's "tax affairs" were being investigated, calling into further question the decision to censor the Hunter Biden scandal in the weeks before the presidential election.
Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment on a series of questions, including if the company regret its decision and if it believes it impacted the election. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when asked the same questions.
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A Media Research Center poll indicated 36% of Biden voters were completely unaware of the allegations.
Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce feels that censorship from Big Tech essentially allowed the mainstream media to follow suit and ignore the allegations.
“What allowed and what kind of set the tone for the absurdity of what media was doing was the blacklisting of the New York Post on Twitter,” Bruce said Thursday on “Fox & Friends.”
“It was that story, recall, and the New York Post lost their account, I think for weeks, because … Twitter disallowed that link, they disallowed the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, they disallowed it all and that set an interesting tone and it was important to know that what Twitter was deciding to censor gave other media permission to say, ‘Oh this is nothing, this is meaningless,’” Bruce said.
Twitter famously suspended the New York Post's main account for weeks because it tweeted the explosive report about Hunter Biden. The company even went to extremes by not even allowing users to share the article, which it initially claimed violated its policy of sharing hacked material, though there was no evidence that the emails published by the Post were hacked.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey eventually admitted that its policy of forbidding anyone to tweet out the Post's Hunter Biden report was a mistake. However, the company's position had remained that the newspaper needed to delete the original tweet in order to regain access to its account, at least until it finally caved to public pressure and restored the Post’s account weeks later.
Former Department of Justice deputy director of public affairs Ian Prior appeared on “America’s Newsroom” to react to the news of Hunter Biden being under federal investigation and said Americans should be “frightened” by Twitter and Facebook’s actions regarding the ongoing scandal.
“Largely the mainstream media just punted on it and Big Tech, Twitter, Facebook, they censored it. That should frighten everybody,” Prior said. “We have what amounts to a ministry of information, formally known as the mainstream media, literally doing nothing about the son of a potential president’s dealings with one of our adversaries and then big tech censoring it. I personally wonder, what has China… how have they infiltrated big tech?”
Prior accused liberal media and Big Tech of “collaborating” to “do nothing” with the story prior to the election.
In the final weeks of the campaign, there was an unprecedented media blackout of the explosive reporting from the Post that shed light on Hunter Biden's questionable business dealings overseas and involved a laptop allegedly belonging to the son of the president-elect and purportedly contained evidence of his dealings with Ukraine, among other things.
After Twitter and Facebook decided to censor the story, the scandal was dismissed by members of the media as “too disgusting” to cover and a "baseless conspiracy theory.”
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It was even revealed through leaked recordings from Project Veritas that CNN president Jeff Zucker and CNN political director David Chalian urged staff to avoid the story.
It is not clear whether the ongoing taxes probe is in any way connected to the laptop's contents.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Ronn Blitzer and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.