Censored and Suppressed
By JIM GERAGHTY Today is a doozy: Facebook and Twitter decided that their users shouldn’t see or be able to read a particular article in the New York Post, and why so many Democrats perceived the Post story as a traumatic flashback to former FBI director James Comey’s letter about Hillary Clinton on October 28, 2016.
The editors of National Review have something important to say about the way two of the largest and most prominent social-media companies, Facebook and Twitter, decided to effectively block access to a news article in the New York Post.
Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications manager (and, per his bio, a former staffer for Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the House Majority PAC), announced that the social-media giant would begin “reducing” the “distribution” of a New York Post investigation into emails purporting that Joe Biden met with a top executive from the Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings at the behest of his son Hunter Biden.
Bad idea.
Instead of simply asking pertinent questions, or debunking the Post’s reporting, a media blackout was initiated. A number of well-known journalists warned colleagues and their sizable social-media audiences not to share the story.
By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Post, and many others for retweeting the story.
There is no credible reason for this kind of targeted suppression. Over the past five years there have been scores of dramatic scoops written by major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN that were based on faulty information provided by unknown sources that turned out to be incorrect. Not once has Facebook or Twitter concerned itself with the sourcing methods of reporters. Not once did it censor any of those pieces.
The editors conclude the mentality at work in the high commands of Facebook and Twitter “further damages the reputation of Big Tech. For another, it renders the industry more susceptible to a new regulatory regime already being championed by some in Congress. Mostly, however, it just makes the story they’re trying to suppress a far bigger deal.”
