Twitter 'interfering' in election, censoring press: Ted Cruz
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reacts to Twitter blocking New York Post stories on Hunter Biden on 'Outnumbered Overtime.'
Mike Huckabee: Facebook & Twitter wrong to aid Joe Biden by covering up NY Post story about his son Hunter
Facebook and Twitter are scrambling to provide cover for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden after his campaign effectively confirmed damning new information about the former vice president’s involvement with his son’s shady business dealings in Ukraine.
The saga began when The New York Post published an exclusive story revealing the existence of emails that appear to indicate that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had arranged a meeting between his father — who was then serving as vice president and exercising oversight of U.S.-Ukraine relations — and an executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
The Ukrainian company was paying Hunter Biden an exorbitant salary to do a job for which he had neither qualifications nor experience.
WHILE CENSORING HUNTER BIDEN STORY, TWITTER ALLOWS CHINA, IRAN STATE MEDIA
This would have been easy enough for the Biden campaign to shrug off or dismiss by simply explaining that the meeting was inconsequential and that Biden had only agreed to it as a favor for his son. That was impossible, however, because the candidate had already painted himself into a corner with his own previous public statements.
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Ever since the issue of Hunter’s suspicious business dealings first emerged, Joe Biden has sought to contain the potential political fallout by insisting — loudly and repeatedly — that he never had any involvement whatsoever with his son’s foreign wheeling and dealing.
Biden insisted last year that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” and even called a voter who brought up the matter at a campaign event a “damn liar.”
So the issue facing the American people isn’t so much whether it would have been improper for Joe Biden to meet with the Burisma executive, but whether he lied when he claimed that he had “never spoken” with Hunter about Burisma. If the meeting did, in fact, take place, then Joe Biden didn’t just speak to Hunter about Burisma — he spoke to Burisma about Hunter.
It was therefore quite shocking when the Biden campaign issued a “denial” that sounded more like a confirmation of the basic substance of the story, saying, “we have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
HUNTER BIDEN EMAIL STORY: A TIMELINE
The statement appears to have been carefully worded in such a way as to cover the campaign’s backside in case more corroborating information emerges. All it really says is that the meeting wasn’t on Biden’s official schedule, and technically it doesn’t even say that.
The campaign could have said that “no meeting ever took place, as alleged by the New York Post.” By placing the reference to the Post in the middle of the sentence, however, the campaign could plausibly claim to be disputing details of the report, rather than the fact of the meeting itself.
Notably, the Biden campaign also refrained from disputing the authenticity of the underlying information, which included many other incriminating emails and photos of a less politically substantial nature. We don’t expect Biden to remember much anymore, but he’d remember this.
In what certainly looks like an effort to contain the damage, Facebook and Twitter took it upon themselves to aggressively censor the Post’s article, restricting users from sharing the link.
Facebook took the ridiculous position that it was prohibiting users from discussing the story because it had not yet been vetted by the social media company’s “fact checkers” — an argument that would essentially give the company carte blanche to block pretty much any information it might decide to suppress.
Twitter even locked the account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany when she tried to tweet about the story, refusing to restore her access to the site unless she removed the post.
Twitter’s justification was even more outrageous than Facebook’s — it claims McEnany violated its rules against distributing content “obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.”
Twitter narrowed this down when it locked the “@TeamTrump” account, saying only that its post about the story violated the company’s rule against “posting private information.”
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My own Twitter account was blocked from tagging the story because it couldn’t be “independently verified.” Newsflash for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: there’s hideous stuff spewed every day on Twitter about me, my daughter and my family — and I guarantee you don’t “independently verify” it, but you let it ride.
To be clear, the information published by The New York Post was not “hacked” or stolen — it was obtained from a laptop that was left for months at a computer repair shop, which never received compensation for its work, according to the newspaper.
As anyone who has ever been inside a computer repair shop can probably recall, such establishments usually have clearly posted signage warning that equipment left in the shop’s possession will be considered abandoned after a certain amount of time.
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The only “private information” Twitter could possibly be protecting is the truth about Biden’s involvement with his son’s dubious dealings.
Biden’s own campaign clearly felt that it couldn’t safely refute the Post’s claims, so two of the most powerful and influential companies in the world stepped in and tried to make sure that those claims would be seen by as few people as possible.