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Big Tech’s increasingly dishonest and abusive assaults on ideas it dislikes will intensify unless the public comes to see that such manipulation is wrong no matter which side is targeted.
The political actions taken Wednesday by Twitter—and to a lesser extent Facebook —went far beyond normal content moderation. Here are the facts: Joe Biden supervised the Obama Administration’s Ukraine policy while his son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. The New York Post found copies of emails it says are between a Burisma executive and Hunter, including one in which the executive thanks Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet” his father.
Twitter says it acted because the Post story violated its “hacked materials” policy. It’s true that the provenance of the story is open for debate and scrutiny—the Post says a laptop with the emails was delivered to a Delaware repair shop, and that the owner gave them to Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Notably, the Biden campaign has not explicitly denied the authenticity of the emails.
The problem is that if Twitter has a policy against “content obtained without authorization,” as the company added, it has a policy against journalism—especially journalism in the Trump era. In 2017 and 2018 the Justice Department fielded 208 criminal referrals for leaks of classified information, more than three times as many as in the prior two years. Stories based on Administration leaks, including about national security matters, have circulated widely on Twitter.
