Trump livid as Twitter, FB act on ‘dodgy’ Biden story
WASHINGTON: Facebook and Twitter restricted the spread of a New York Post story that suggested corruption by US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, triggering anger from the incumbent Donald Trump who accused the social media companies of being the “third arm” of his rival.
The move opens a new controversy just 20 days to the close of polling on November 3, and could further fan friction on divisions on facts and censorship at a time when misinformation and disinformation have been seen as threats that could undermine the electoral process.
Twitter prohibited its users from posting links to the Post story, while Facebook reduced how often the story showed up in its users’ news feeds and elsewhere on the Facebook platform. Both said the story violated its content policies.
President Trump hit out at the two social media companies. “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,” he said on Twitter, and called for repealing a statutory provision — Section 230 of Communications Decent Act — that grants social media platforms the freedom to self-regulate their content. “It’s like a third arm, maybe a first arm, of the DNC ( the Democratic National Committee),” Trump said on Fox Business Network on Thursday, referring to Twitter and Facebook. “It’s a massive campaign contribution.”
The New York Post, a conservative-leaning publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported that Hunter Biden had sought to set up a meeting in 2015 between his father, then vice president, and an executive of a Ukrainian energy company where he was serving as a board member.
The information about this meeting, which is not reported to have taken place at all, was obtained purportedly from emails in a laptop the younger Biden had left at a Delaware repair store but never took it back. The store owner had passed on the computer to the president’s personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani’s through his lawyer. And Giuliani passed on computer’s contents to the publication reportedly.
The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts said there are multiple red flags that raised doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belonged to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington, AP reported.
A bipartisan US Senate report on April 21 confirmed US intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to sow chaos by deploying disinformation.
Twitter also restricted the one of the official campaign accounts of Trump from posting a video about the report, and restricted the account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Allies of the president, who is trailing Biden, have sought to portray the story as potentially the “October Surprise” of the 2020 election, using a term for an unforeseen setback that leaves a targeted candidate with little or no time to recover.
Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesperson, sought to debunk the NY Post report saying these allegations had been investigated before by the press, Republican-led congressional bodies and others. “They all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath,” Bates said. He further said that the New York Post never checked “critical elements of this story” with the Biden campaign, which, he went on to add, has already “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place”