Rita Panahi: Dangerous new era of censorship as big tech suppresses Biden story
Tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have always favoured the Left, but until this week that bias was exercised in a more subtle fashion than flat-out suppression of a major news story, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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We are entering a dangerous new era of censorship the likes of which we have not seen before in the free world.
The Left’s totalitarian zeal for silencing their political adversaries is manifesting in a number of disturbing ways on social media, where a sizeable percentage of the population now access the news.
That big tech — including Google, Facebook and Twitter — leans heavily Left is not in question, and has been written about at length, but until this week that bias was exercised in a more subtle fashion than flat-out suppression of a major news story.
Facebook and Twitter have crossed a line that they may well regret by first limiting and then banning the circulation of a story broken by a major media outlet.
On Thursday the New York Post published an exclusive on Hunter Biden essentially selling access to his then vice-president father who is hot favourite to become the next president of the United States.
It is a huge yarn, given we know that Hunter received $83,000 per month in “consultancy fees” from a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, despite the fact that he had zero industry experience.
The Post uncovered emails, photographs and even video of a drug fuelled sexual escapade but what is most significant is the “smoking gun email” showing Joe Biden met with a top Burisma executive at Hunter’s urging.
Biden is on the record saying he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings”.
What makes the NY Post’s story all the more newsworthy is the fact that Biden is on video bragging about threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee during a 2015 trip to the Ukraine to pressure then president Petro Poroshenko and prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to sack a prosecutor investigating Burisma, the company that paid his unqualified, deadbeat son a million dollars a year. The pressure to sack the prosecutor came mere months after Biden met with a Burisma executive, according to the Post.
But the Biden camp claims they wanted the prosecutor fired purely due to corruption concerns and on the rare occasions that the Democratic presidential candidate has been asked about his son’s dodgy business dealings he has reacted with righteous anger.
When a constituent in Iowa dared ask Biden about the Burisma deal, Biden launched into a bizarre diatribe accusing the man of being a “damn liar” and “too old to vote for me” before labelling him “fat” and challenging him to a “push-ups” contest and “IQ test.”
The Post’s story is explosive stuff but within hours of its publication both Twitter and Facebook were blocking users from sharing it and deleting copies that were already posted. Indeed, the Post’s official Twitter account was locked and tweets sharing the article were deleted.
A number of conservative accounts that posted a link to a story splashed on the front page of a major newspaper had their accounts suspended. Even the White House press secretary’s personal account was locked and her tweet sharing the article deleted.
The suppression effort from the social media giants saw Twitter prevent people from sharing the article by labelling the link “potentially harmful”.
Not only did Twitter “disappear” a legitimate news story, and lie about the reasons why, but it then promoted as their ‘top story’ a verifiable lie claiming “then vice-president Biden played no role in pressuring Ukraine officials into firing the prosecutor”, despite the fact that there is a 2018 video of Biden confirming he played a role.
Twitter falsely claimed that the Post’s story was “hacked” and then claimed that it blocked its circulation because of a “policy established in 2018, (that) prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorisation”.
By that standard, every second story about President Trump or any leader, acquired through leaks or unauthorised use of information would be banned.
It was only last month that Twitter was promoting the New York Times story on Trump’s tax returns that were acquired without authorisation. Rather selective enforcement of its own rules.
Twitter and Facebook regularly push fake or debunked stories and allow such stories to trend, including insane Russian conspiracy theories. Any story damaging to Trump is elevated no matter how flimsy, anonymously sourced or fantastical. But stories damaging his political opponents are buried and in this case banned.
It’s Orwellian but not that surprising when you consider that Andy Stone, the Facebook executive bragging about censoring the Post’s story has a lengthy history as a Democrat staffer and Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, is so biased that he refers to Trump as a “racist” and a “Nazi”.
As the Post stated in an editorial: “Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines.”
IN SHORT
Someone close to former prime minister Kevin Rudd should take his phone away, delete his Twitter account and encourage him to enjoy his $17m beach house instead of pandering to social media’s looniest lowlifes.
RITA PANAHI IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST