Miranda Devine: Joe Biden campaign aided by social media censorship of NY Post report on son Hunter
This is election interference by global tech oligarchs to restrict information that might damage the Democratic Party.
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n case there was any doubt that Facebook and Twitter are corruptly partisan, the social-media giants censored The New York Post’s story Wednesday on Hunter Biden’s e-mails suggesting he took cash for access to his father, Joe Biden.
The bombshell exclusive was trending all Wednesday morning on social media platforms until Big Tech stepped in to run protection for the Democratic presidential candidate.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Facebook announced it would censor the story by “reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Twitter also intervened to protect Biden from the scandal Wednesday by blocking The Post’s Twitter account, @nypost, claiming the story violates its rules against “distribution of hacked material.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Links to the story were tagged by Twitter with a warning message: “This link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Twitter later attached a new warning to the story: “The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe.”
But the only “potentially harmful” or “unsafe” impact of The Post story is on the Biden campaign — and, now, on the credibility of Facebook and Twitter.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Did Facebook and Twitter impose the same censorship on The New York Times story on President Trump’s leaked — or “hacked” — tax returns two weeks ago?
Did they ever fact-check the Times’ and The Washington Post’s debunked “Russia collusion” tall tales?
Did they interfere with BuzzFeed spreading the Steele Dossier tissue of lies?
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Nope.
Big Tech only suppresses information that reflects badly on the Biden campaign.
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The emails and photographs we have published speak for themselves. They come from the hard drive of Hunter’s laptop computer, legally obtained by The Post after he abandoned it at a Mac-computer repair shop in Delaware.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}They tell an alarming story of Biden family grift in Eastern Europe and China, including in Ukraine during the time Joe was vice president in charge of America’s interests there.
The emails we published fly in the face of Joe’s claims that he knew nothing about his son’s lucrative foreign business dealings.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}To the contrary, they show a connection between Joe and Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter, a chronic drug user with no relevant experience, as much as $83,000 a month for no discernible reason other than for political influence with his father.
One email The Post published showed that, in 2015, a senior member of Burisma thanked Hunter “for the opportunity to meet” his father, then the vice president.
It was months after that introduction that Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless the Ukrainian government fired its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who says he was investigating Burisma for alleged corruption.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Post’s story goes to the heart of Joe Biden’s integrity, and American voters deserve to know the details.
To illustrate the incongruity of foreign companies paying such a person millions of dollars, we published one photograph yesterday showing Hunter asleep with a crack pipe in his mouth.
Instead of calling a press conference to respond head on to the allegations, Joe Biden went into hiding Wednesday.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}His campaign called a “lid” on in-person events before 9:40 a.m., shutting off the Democratic candidate for president from any interaction with the media all day.
The campaign issued a statement claiming The Post’s story was “discredited.” And it would only say that the meeting didn’t show up on Joe’s “official schedules from the time.”
Even Joe is not silly enough to make such a meeting “official.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}There are clear implications for national security in the material we have published, which indicates the Biden family has leveraged Joe’s position for cash from shady clients overseas.
It is a legitimate news story that deserves answers.
Instead, Biden’s docile media allies swallowed his campaign’s obfuscations on Wednesday and tried to smother The Post’s story.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Democratic operative Andy Stone, Facebook’s communications manager, issued a statement via Twitter at 11:10 a.m.: “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be [sic] clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Stone, who joined Facebook in 2014 from a Democratic super PAC, has worked for former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
He also just happens to be tied to John Kerry, the former secretary of state who is tied to the Biden family scandal through his stepson Chris Heinz, a one-time business partner of Hunter Biden, as co-owner of private-equity firm Rosemont Seneca Partners.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Stone worked for 16 months for the John Kerry for President campaign, in the Manchester regional field office and “Assistant to National Director of Veterans for Kerry.”
He is the last person Facebook should have deputized to announce the throttling of The Post’s story.
Make no mistake: this is election interference by unaccountable global tech oligarchs to restrict information that might damage the Democratic Party.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It is coordinated censorship by two of the largest multinational companies in the world. Their monopoly power should be broken up, once and for all.
The Biden family ties to corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma are disturbing enough, but it is the China connection that has most potential to damage America’s security interests.
Disturbing questions about Joe Biden are raised over Hunter accompanying his father on Air Force Two to China in December 2013, for an eight-day visit with Communist Party grandees, after which Hunter scored an investment deal reportedly worth as much as $1.5 billion with a subsidiary of the Bank of China.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Joe always has denied his son’s business activities ever influenced U.S. policy.
But, on even the most neutral basis, it is ethically compromising for the son of a vice president and presidential candidate to be engaging in financial transactions with foreign governments, especially with our most potent strategic foe.
As the Obama administration’s point man for China, Joe Biden has boasted about the amount of face time he has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Biden told the Council for Foreign Relations in 2018.
“I have 25 hours of private dinners with him, just he and I, and one interpreter.”
Biden was sent to China in 2013 on a number of missions, including to persuade Xi to stop militarizing the South China Sea by building islands and putting bases on them.
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He failed spectacularly.
Throughout his vice presidency, Biden steered America into a position of sycophancy with China, missing the strategic threat it posed to our interests and those of our allies, like Australia, Japan and Taiwan.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}As a presidential candidate, he has not changed his tune. Last May, Biden declared China was “not competition” for the U.S.
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It is willful blindness, at best, for a senior politician not to perceive the threat from China.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The fact that Biden’s son is embroiled in multimillion-dollar financial deals with Chinese state-owned enterprises suggests something more sinister may be afoot.
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