Be alarmed by social media censorship

Last week, social media giants Twitter and Facebook proved that their monopolistic malpractice is a big problem for politics and culture in America.

When the New York Post published a story about suspicious emails that had been discovered between Hunter Biden and officials at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he was paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to serve on the board, the revelations were remarkable.

In one 2015 missive, a Burisma adviser named Vadym Pozharskyi thanked the Vice President’s son “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It’s realty (sic) an honor and pleasure.”

The Biden campaign has insisted that no such meeting was found to be on the official schedule, but they do not outright dispute the content of the emails or deny that an informal meeting could have occurred.

A year earlier, right after the younger Biden had been added to the company’s board, Pozharskyi asked him for “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal” to put a stop to an investigation into the company.

Later, Vice President Biden bragged he had been able to get the prosecutor fired.

The trove of correspondence was passed on to the Post by Rudy Giuliani who has been loudly trying to draw connections of corruption between interests in Ukraine and Joe Biden via his son, Hunter.

According the the New York Post, the emails were recovered from a computer that was dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved. It is not known who dropped the machine off.

What makes all this most newsworthy is that Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, has been denying that he’d ever taken part in his son’s business overseas or that he was even aware of what that business was.

These emails go directly to refuting that and suggest that Biden was used by his son for payment in exchange for influence.

Thus, the story ran and was distributed through social media until prominent, anti-Trump users demanded that it stop.

Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer with more than 900,000 followers tweeted, “No one should link to or share that NY Post ‘report’. You can discuss the obvious flaws and unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be disinformation.”

Andy Stone, who works in the communications department at Facebook but has a long resume featuring jobs with various Democratic organizations was also containing the story. “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post,” Stone tweeted, “I want be 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.”

By the afternoon, Twitter started blocking sharing of the article in any form, warning users away from the link, and locking prominent accounts that shared it, including that of the New York Post itself, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the Trump campaign account @teamtrump.

In doing so, they turned a shady October surprise leak that would have been ignored by many in the mainstream into a major story that is reverberating through the country. What, many Americans wonder, do these massive tech companies want so badly to hide from them?

The selective censorship by social media monopolies threatens to divide our nation to a degree we have never seen before.