US election 2020: Why Facebook, Twitter went too far censoring anti-Joe Biden report
The most contentious election in modern US history is only weeks away, and the decision by Facebook and Twitter to censor an article criticising Donald Trump’s rival Joe Biden has been divisive.
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It started as a great day for Donald Trump, with revelations Joe Biden’s son was apparently running a “massive pay for play” racket with a corrupt Ukrainian company when his father was vice president.
But when Big Tech plunged headfirst into the US election, censoring negative reporting about Mr Trump’s Democrat presidential opponent and thereby confirming every Republican fear about social media bias, it was like Christmas and a birthday with another “miracle” COVID cure thrown in.
Ask any fence-sitting American why they might be leaning towards a Trump-vote and you are likely to hear a variation of this answer: I don’t want to be told how to think and I don’t trust the Washington establishment.
With less than three weeks until the most contentious election in modern US history, the decision by Facebook and Twitter to shutter conversation about the New York Post bombshell seems inexplicably dense.
There have been few bigger irritants to the Trump White House than the “Russia Hoax”, which has become the catch-all for the repeated probes that led to Democrats’ unsuccessful impeachment attempt.
The central claim of Mr Trump’s impeachable “abuse of power” was that he had asked the newly installed Ukraine president to investigate the highly unqualified Hunter Biden’s richly paid role on the board of a corrupt energy company.
Biden Jnr, who was widely known to have a drug problem, was paid more than $100,000 month by Burisma and millions more from China and Russia while his father was Barack Obama’s VP.
It seems reasonable to question how and why this happened, but Americans were told they didn’t deserve to know the answers.
First, the Biden 2020 camp called another early “lid” and avoided any probing questions from the press.
So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun†emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!! https://t.co/g1RJFpIVUZ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2020
Then a Facebook executive smirked that the Post story was “eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” and that “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform”.
Finally Twitter stopped the story from being shared, locking Post accounts and even that of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
By night-time a jubilant Mr Trump stripped off his tie and looked ready to take off even more on a rally stage in Iowa – a state where he shouldn’t have been in such a good mood given he handily won it in 2016 and is currently in a dead heat.
About the same time Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying some damage control, but it was widely seen as too little too late.
“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,” he tweeted.
You don’t say.