For about half a decade, Democrats have been united in their crusade to break up Big Tech, and in recent years, the libertarian wing of the Republican Party has been losing ground to so-called “national conservatives” who seem keen to join wannabe regulators across the aisle. Despite the waning faction of Republicans begging Twitter and Facebook not to bait increasingly ravenous regulators, our Silicon Valley overlords can’t help themselves. Although increased content moderation and trigger warnings have slowly taken over both sites, they may have just opened the floodgates to Republican rule over the internet.
At 5 a.m. on Wednesday, the New York Post published a salacious but suspicious exclusive story implicating Joe Biden with his son’s shady dealings in Ukraine. Consider that Hunter Biden, through a plethora of irresponsible actions, has been making his way through Ukraine and the tabloids for years now, with President Trump’s impeachment relegated to distant memory and Biden probably cruising to victory. Not one of the persuadable seniors or suburban moms in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt that Trump needs to salvage his reelection odds will care about the umpteenth Hunter Biden story, and the odds of it fading into the usual obscurity of the genre are exceptionally high. But after hours of moaning from our miserable media, Facebook affirmatively claimed to tamper down on the article’s dissemination, and Twitter outright blocked users’ ability to publish or message the link at all.
In a picture-perfect illustration of the Streisand effect, what would have been forgotten by happy hour on Wednesday is now an A1 news story for every conservative to the right of the Lincoln Project and every liberal to the left of Glenn Greenwald. Already calls from the Big-Government wing of the Republican Party have been blasted from the Capitol.
Every Republican lawmaker must DO SOMETHING about it. Change #Section230 https://t.co/ZimWG0RKy2
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 14, 2020
Twitter, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, Amazon and Apple have survived in their current forms thanks to a lack of a complete bipartisan consensus to come after them. But overtly censoring an investigation from the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton expressly to aid the Biden campaign might have just broken the final bulwark protecting Big Tech from itself. Libertarian-minded Republicans simply will not be able to hold the legislative line.
The New York Post piece has been live for 13.5 hours as of this article’s publication time. Not one piece of it has been debunked, and the best the Daily Beast could do was report that the man who gave Hunter Biden’s laptop to Rudy Giuliani certainly seems shifty.
This is a far, far cry from Buzzfeed’s decision to publish the unredacted and uncorroborated Steele dossier, crucial portions of which were debunked within hours of its release.
Just as the New York Times’s attempt to blacklist Tom Cotton from its op-ed pages resulted in a $1 million fundraising haul, make no mistake: This is how you get President Josh Hawley and his bipartisan administration hellbent on corroding capitalism.
Recall all the strange, new respect Elizabeth Warren earned from conservatives when she was talking about breaking up Big Tech along with the banks before her turn for the woke? She just gained half a party of allies ready to work with her to take under government control a private company created without a cent of taxpayer dollars. Just as Trump successfully ran against the media in 2016, Hawley knows where his bread is buttered. Twitter may have enjoyed the show of force today, but it will pay — if not now, then in 2024.
