Twitter and Facebook get into the news censorship business

It contained email evidence that Biden’s son, Hunter, had introduced his father, who was then the vice president, to a shady Ukrainian businessman who had been sluicing massive amounts of money into the younger Biden’s bank account. If true, this would mean that the former veep brazenly lied about his level of knowledge and involvement in his wayward son’s affairs.

Facebook responded with a public announcement that it would restrict the story’s spread. Twitter went further, blocking users’ ability to share the link at all. Those people who found a loophole and managed to click the link from Twitter anyway were redirected to a page warning that the material was “harmful.”

Twitter’s response to the justified public outcry has been contemptible. CEO Jack Dorsey responded to the conflagration by bemoaning only his company’s poor public relations strategy: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great,” he tweeted. “And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.” The assumption behind his excuse-making is that his company’s censorship of news is acceptable, and only its poor framing of the action was askew. This is not true. America has a free press and First Amendment because it is one of our foundational values. We don’t expect merely a smoother presentation of the underlying outrage.

That Twitter should block a news article from being shared even in private messages is an astounding overreach, and a clear sign (as if more were needed) that the company is a partisan actor not committed to fair play or a clear policy.

A Twitter spokesman cited its “Hacked Materials Policy” as justification for the censorship. This is curious and utterly implausible given Twitter’s total lack of concern about other hacked and hoax materials during the Trump era. When the New York Times acquired President Trump’s tax returns, something its reporters could not have done without the help of someone committing a federal crime, social media platforms rightly allowed the story to be spread unhindered.

Beyond that, Twitter and Facebook have shown little concern for truth. On everything from the Steele dossier to the Russia collusion conspiracy hoax and everything in between, no one at Twitter was bothered. The New York Times recently published then stealth-deleted completely bogus speculation that Trump was standing in front of a green screen when he was supposed to have been standing in the White House Rose Garden. Nobody saw fit to lock the Times out of its Twitter account in the same way a few days later that they did to punish the Post.

Perhaps the facts of the New York Post story are in dispute, although judging by the Biden campaign’s reaction, it appears to have some truth to it. Perhaps someone thinks the information was derived from unacceptable sources. But what does that mean? How does that not apply to the New York Times scoop on Trump’s taxes?

The simple fact is, these are not matters that Facebook and Twitter are in any position to judge. This is why social media companies should not try to police news on the internet.

Democrats wrongly scapegoated social media companies for Trump’s 2016 victory, when, in truth, blame lay with their repellent candidate. Big Tech is anxious about Democratic threats. They fear that they will be blamed if Trump wins again. They think they can placate Democrats, who would love to break up their companies, by protecting the party’s candidate. But, in fact, they are just painting a target on their backs.

There is a growing clamor among Republicans to regulate social media, or to take away its protection from legal liability. The moment the social media companies lose the party that is by nature against regulation and in favor of free markets, they will have no friends in Washington at all.