The New York Post published a story on Wednesday that suggests Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden engaged in overt political corruption while he was vice president. But people are not allowed to read it, according to Facebook and Twitter.
The social media giants banned the circulation of the story on Wednesday afternoon due to “the lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials included in the article,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. As a result, users are unable to share the article in posts or direct messages. Twitter also locked the New York Post out of its account.
In other words, Facebook and Twitter are actively suppressing information they don’t like. There is simply no other explanation. Dozens of questionable stories with shaky sourcing are published every day, and some have had far-reaching consequences.
Take, for example, the Steele dossier, which played a fundamental role in the Democrats’ Russiagate accusations against President Trump. Multiple investigations have found that the Steele dossier was completely unreliable. One of its own subsources discredited much of what British ex-spy Christopher Steele reported in it, and recently declassified documents reveal that the FBI could not verify any of the dossier’s principal claims.
There was always a good chance that the Steele dossier was illegitimate garbage, but the media reported on it anyway — because that is the media’s job. Some outlets were a little too eager to accept it as fact, but there is no question that reporters had not only the right but the responsibility to report on the dossier and its claims, albeit skeptically. But if we were to apply Twitter’s new standard to the Steele dossier, reports about it should never have been allowed to circulate. It, too, lacked authoritative reporting, and its sourcing was always questionable. But I don’t recall the dossier being banned from Twitter’s platform.
And that’s because people are smart enough to read a report and determine for themselves what to make of it. That was the premise Twitter and Facebook operated on when the Steele dossier was circulating, and that is the premise they have now hypocritically chosen to abandon. Perhaps they have done so because they’re worried about what might happen if the public reads the New York Post’s allegations.
To be sure, there are legitimate questions about the New York Post story’s sourcing and reliability. We should be able to ask them without worrying that the tech police will lock us out of our accounts. But for now, Big Tech’s reaction to this story should serve as proof that perhaps there is something going on — something they don’t want you to know about.
