A Facebook official announced that the social media site will reduce the distribution of a New York Post story alleging Hunter Biden had set up a meeting between a senior official at Burisma Holdings and his father, former vice president Joe Biden.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director, said in a tweet. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, 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.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Facebook has amped up its efforts to stop the spread of disinformation, particularly in a high-interest election year. The social media giant relies on third-party fact-checking organizations to help provide fact-checks on claims and information that spreads without evidence. Facebook said its other goals are to make it more difficult for people who promote or post fake news to buy ads through them, and they have upped their detection of fake online profiles.
According to Stone’s Twitter account, he was formerly associated with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Facebook and other tech companies of Silicon Valley have come under fire from conservative pundits and Republican lawmakers who allege the companies are biased in their fact-checking efforts, targeting right-leaning content more often than left.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Facebook for comment.
The New York Post story, which was published Wednesday, accuses Hunter Biden of mediating communications between Joe Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi, a top official from the Ukrainian energy firm, in which the younger Biden served on the board of directors. The story contradicts previous claims by the current Democratic presidential nominee that he never spoke with any of his relatives about their private business affairs.
The alleged meeting came to light in an email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, which was obtained by the New York Post. The email was reportedly discovered on a computer, which is believed to have belonged to Hunter Biden, and was left at a repair shop in Delaware.
The repair shop owner had told the paper he made a copy of the computer’s hard drive and gave it to a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had alerted the New York Post about the existence of the hard drive last month, and Giuliani provided them a copy on Sunday.
The Biden campaign disputed the contents of the story, as well as the GOP-led investigation into Hunter Biden in the Senate.
“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Politico.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story,” Bates added. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani – whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported – claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
A September report that came out from Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who have spearheaded the investigation into Hunter Biden, concluded that his high-paid position on the firm’s board had reportedly raised ethical concerns during the Obama administration.
Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings have also been the subject of the Trump campaign’s reelection efforts, despite his father’s assertion that his son had done no wrong.
At a campaign event last year, the older Biden had emphasized that he had not spoken to his family about their private ventures and would continue to avoid doing so if he is elected president.
“I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period,” Joe Biden said. “What I will do is the same thing we did in our administration. There will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business interests] and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I’m going to propose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That’s why I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else, even distant family, about their business interests.”
