Facebook, Twitter executives grilled during Judiciary committee hearing
Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner joins 'Special Report' with the latest.
Twitter might have finally won its war against its archenemy — President Donald Trump.
Tuesday in the U.S. Senate, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey once again admitted, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election,” that censoring the New York Post scoop about the Hunter Biden scandal “was wrong.”
Except it appears to have worked.
At least, as of right now, Biden has been declared the winner by news outlets. And he remains ahead in the race, pending Trump’s court challenge. Unless Trump can pull off enough last-minute court victories, Twitter and Facebook cost Trump the election.
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They did it by hiding the Hunter Biden story. A post-election poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates showed more than a third (36 percent) of Biden voters didn’t even know about the scandal. The Media Research Center poll said his voters were unaware of allegations that Biden and his son had financial ties to communist China.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Facebook and Twitter's actions around the closely contested election on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, in Washington.. (Bill Clark/Pool via AP)
Thirteen percent of those voters were enough to turn the election for Trump. That works out to 4.6 percent of the total vote for the former vice president. They said they wouldn’t have voted for Biden if they had known. That would likely have shifted enough votes to cost Biden the Electoral College.
Unless Trump can pull off enough last-minute court victories, Twitter and Facebook cost Trump the election.
The original New York Post story was headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” It created an enormous bad news narrative for Biden weeks before the election. So the two biggest social media sites in the world censored it and stopped the story dead in its tracks.
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Facebook announced it would restrict access to the story, pending action by its fact-checkers. Except even the fact-checkers admitted that wasn’t the typical policy. The International Fact-Checking Network, which handles Facebook fact-checking, criticized the company. “The decision to reduce or prevent the distribution of @nypost 's article based on some mysterious, non-transparent criteria and an unknown methodology is a serious mistake,” the organization tweeted.
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Twitter suspended links to the story and those who linked to it. That included numerous prominent people on Twitter such as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Traditional news outlets were largely silent about the censorship, happy to see a bad Biden story killed before it could truly harm their candidate.
Trump has been the enemy of leftist Twitter for his entire presidency, despite having nearly 89 million followers on the site. While the site refused to shut him down, it has censored him and his campaign nearly 200 times. Most of those have come this month.
But this incident was appalling. The social media site committed one of the greatest acts of censorship in American history when it shut down the Hunter Biden scandal.
Here’s Dorsey’s latest explanation for that censorship, where he told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.” Except Twitter still demanded the Post take down its original tweet, which it refused to do.
It took 17 days for Twitter to admit it was wrong in this way, as well. Seventeen days -- right before an election.
This wasn’t the first time Dorsey admitted that Twitter messed up. Back on Oct. 14, he tweeted: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
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Except it wasn’t so unacceptable that Twitter was willing to fix the problem right away.
Who said cheaters never prosper?