What appeared to be indisputable “smoking gun” evidence linking Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter to a major scandal long denied by left-wing media did little to sway tech companies like Facebook amid their aggressive, anti-conservative censorship campaign.
The New York Post revealed it had obtained, courtesy of Rudy Giuliani, a trove of damning emails and other data from Hunter Biden’s old laptop that offered evidence of Joe Biden meeting with Burisma representatives, among other things.
The hard-drive data—given to Giuliani by a computer-repair technician in Delaware—also included raunchy photos of Hunter engaging in sex acts with an unidentified woman while smoking crack.
However, Facebook quickly moved to “reduce the distribution” of the story on its platform while the news underwent a fact-check by its demonstrably biased third-party auditors
In response, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., one of Big Tech’s biggest critics in Congress, warned the social-media giant that he planned to investigate its biased efforts to sway the upcoming election by allowing Biden to sow disinformation about his corrupt foreign business dealings.
“The seemingly selective nature of this public intervention suggests partiality on the part of Facebook,” Hawley wrote in a letter Wednesday addressed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“And your efforts to suppress the distribution of content revealing potentially unethical activity by a candidate for president raises a number of additional questions, to which I expect responses immediately.”
Hawley called out Facebook for its rush to denounce the news as false while lacking any justification apart from its desire to protect Biden.
“If you have evidence that this news story contains ‘disinformation’ or have otherwise determined that there are inaccuracies with the reporting, will you disclose them to the public so that they can assess your findings?” Hawley demanded.
Barring such evidence, he said, the presumption that a fact-check was warranted appeared itself to be a deceptive valuation of the article’s credibility.
He also questioned whether the Biden campaign had pressured Facebook into removing the content.
Facebook’s increasingly dictatorial censorship already has raised considerable alarms during the final months of the election season.
It has actively sought to de-platform conservative groups and has engaged in shadow-banning and filtering of information that it deems—without evidence—to be false or overly controversial.
However, a number of the topics that it has “fact-checked“—such a the corrupt World Health Organization’s ever-evolving policies regarding masks and lockdowns in the coronavirus pandemic—have subsequently been validated.
Consequently, Facebook’s insinuations that the information is invalid have, in fact, promoted their own manner of disinformation, although neither the company nor other Biden-backing media allies have sought to correct the record in equal measure.
Biden has frequently relied upon claims of “no evidence” or “discredited” reports to avoid offering any sort of substantive response to the valid voter concerns.
As Hawley noted, the campaign donations from Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies—including Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube—have offered clear evidence of their own leftist leanings.
Even so, the platforms have long sought autonomy and legal protections by claiming that they are impartial conduits for user content rather than active curators of such content.
President Donald Trump has threatened to hold the companies accountable under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
However, it appears unlikely that he will be able to deter them from their concerted effort to sway the election outcome.
In addition to Facebook’s censorship of the Burisma bombshell, Google’s news division also appeared to be trying to suppress it.
A search by Headline USA on Wednesday turned up no articles about the Post report and generally displayed only positive stories about Biden’s campaign.
