Julio Rosas
TownhallWed, 14 Oct 2020 13:10 UTC
© AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu
Facebook announced on Wednesday they will be "reducing" the spread of the new
New York Post story about Hunter Biden, which claims new emails and photos shed light on his foreign business dealings, as it undergoes a review by "third-party fact checking partners."
The announcement was made by Andy Stone, who currently works as Policy Communications Manager for Facebook. In his tweet, he made it a point to not link to the Post's story, adding,
"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."
Stone has a history of working for Democrats before joining Facebook. According to Stone's LinkedIn, he has previously worked as a western regional press secretary at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a press secretary for former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and a communications director for House Majority PAC.Stone was heavily criticized for the decision:
The Post reported, citing obtained emails, that "Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company."The Post also published never-before-seen photos of Hunter, including one where there is a crack pipe in his mouth as he is sleeping, saying they were from a hard drive that was from a computer that was dropped off at a repair shop and was never paid for or retrieved.Biden's presidential campaign said no such meeting took place:
Update 1:Stone sent a second tweet saying it is "our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review."
The Trump campaign pointed out how "the Biden campaign does not dispute the authenticity of the emails published by the New York Post, which serves to confirm that they are real."
Update 2:Twitter is now also censoring the Post story as users tweeted they are unable to tweet the story. When someone tries to tweet the link, a prompt pops up and says, "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful."In addition, when users try to clink on links that were already tweeted, it brings them to a page that reads, "The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter's URL Policy."
A spokesperson for Twitter said they are blocking the link to the Post story because it is "in line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
Comment: Apparently this is the first time Twitter has invoked this
hacked materials policy. From RT:
Twitter BLOCKS sharing links to NYPost's Hunter Biden emails story, invoking 'HACKED MATERIALS' policy for first time ever
Twitter has one-upped Facebook's censorship regarding a story based on alleged emails from Democratic candidate Joe Biden's son Hunter about his Ukraine dealings, blocking all users from sharing it via tweet or direct message.
Twitter users were blocked on Wednesday from sharing the New York Post story critical of the Bidens published just that morning. The decision was based on a never-before-invoked "hacked materials policy" that Twitter announced hours after Facebook had stomped on the same story.
The Post cited emails that appeared to show Joe Biden - then vice president to Barack Obama - had met with Ukrainian Burisma exec Vadim Pozharskyi at the behest of his son and Burisma adviser Hunter Biden, less than a year before the current Democratic presidential candidate allegedly demanded Kiev fire its top prosecutor.
...
Twitter "errors" started pouring in just a few hours after Andy Stone, a Facebook executive with a long history of working for the Democratic Party, warned Facebook was "reducing [the Hunter Biden story's] distribution" on its platform and seemingly invited Facebook's fact-checkers to tear the story apart.
While Twitter users were able to share the offending Post link for hours after Stone tagged it for destruction, what Twitter lacked in temporal primacy it made up in intensity.
Users who attempted to share the story on Wednesday afternoon were informed they could not retweet the "potentially harmful" link. Unlike typical Twitter warning screens that can be clicked through, the link to the Post story was not even allowed to be posted.
As speculation swirled regarding the Biden emails, Forbes reporter Jack Brewster posted a statement, allegedly from Twitter, reading that "in line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
...
While Twitter has outlawed entire domains in the past - most notably Bitchute.com, a YouTube competitor whose exile it partially walked back after widespread protest from users - nothing like the blanket ban on the Post URL has ever been seen before.
Many readers opined that by blocking the URL and deleting the Post's tweet Twitter had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of the Biden emails.
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Others merely interpreted the secondhand missive as Twitter throwing its hat in the ring for Biden, deeming the act "brazen election interference."
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Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said he wrote to Facebook to complain about executive Andy Stone's actions, asking if the preemptive shadowbanning pending fact-checking was "normal" and whether the Biden campaign had played some role in reducing the article's reach.
Meanwhile, NYT journalist Maggie Haberman.
From RT:
Even mentioning the October surprise story about Hunter Biden in order to criticize it has landed journalist Maggie Haberman in hot water with online Democrat activists, who furiously accused her of helping President Donald Trump.
It appears that Haberman broke the unwritten code of silence in the mainstream media by sharing a New York Post story on Wednesday that claimed to show that the son of the Democratic presidential nominee engaged in corrupt dealings with a Ukrainian gas company.
Haberman was apparently trying to criticize the story, but merely mentioning it earned the New York Times reporter an avalanche of opprobrium - and a new nickname, based on the Trump campaign slogan "Make America Great Again."
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The avalanche of attacks on Haberman is particularly ironic, given that it was four years ago this week that she was exposed as a "friendly journalist" trusted by Hillary Clinton's campaign to "tee up stories" for them.
On October 10, 2016, WikiLeaks published an email obtained from the personal account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, showing a January 2015 exchange between her campaign staff.
"We have [had] a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year," wrote Clinton's communications director Nick Merrill to campaign manager Robby Mook. "We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed."
The campaign thinks it "can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie," Merrill added.
Apparently the tweets of former Democratic Party staffer now working as Facebook's communications exec, Andy Stone, caught the eye of Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr:
More from RT on the reaction of the Biden campaign and others:
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After the story had already made the rounds on social media, the Biden campaign weighed in to deny any meeting between Biden and Pozharskyi had taken place - though it notably did not comment on any of the more salacious aspects of the Post's stories, including photos and videos appearing to show the candidate's son smoking crack and having sex.
Apparently bracing for fact-checker impact, the Post reported the repairman-whistleblower who'd leaked the emails was working with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to verify the information. He claimed to have reached out to the committee in September after it released a report on Biden's apparent conflicts of interest, which included a reported $3.5 million payment from the wife of the ex-mayor of Moscow to a company co-founded by Hunter Biden.
Blue-checks and #Resistance stalwarts rallied to Stone's (and Biden's) defense on Twitter, warning that the Post story was based on a "huge falsehood" - namely that Biden had forced the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. This was untrue, they argued, because others had wanted the prosecutor fired as well.
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Stone's Twitter feed bristles with boasts about suppressing content on Facebook, including claims that the platform "displayed warnings on more than 150 million pieces of content" that had been "debunked by one of our third-party fact-checkers," deleted "more than 120,000 pieces of Facebook and Instagram content" for violating its US policy on voter interference, and "rejected ad submissions before they could run about 2.2 million times."
Facebook is far from the only social media platform to attract Democrat apparatchiks, however. Twitter communications exec Nick Pacilio previously worked as press secretary for Democrat vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, while the platform's head of editorial for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Gordon MacMillan, is a member of the UK military's infamous 77th Brigade information-warfare unit.
Twitter applied a warning screen to the Post's story late Wednesday afternoon, presenting users who clicked on the link with an alert that the "link may be unsafe."
Even Trump has weighed in on the controversy:
From RT:
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"REPEAL SECTION 230!!!" the president added, referring to the provision in the Communications Decency Act shielding social media platforms from legal liability if they act "in good faith" to remove objectionable content posted by users.
Since then, Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet and others have invoked it as grounds to police any content they deem inappropriate - including the ever-shifting definitions of "potential harm" and "election interference."
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"It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician," Trump said cryptically in his tweet, suggesting more information is forthcoming.
Shortly thereafter, his son Donald Trump Jr said it was "time to break up Big Tech. Their total bias and flagrant suppression of information can't stand in America."
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans tweeted: "See you [Jack]," along with a video of someone unsuccessfully trying to share the New York Post story. It was aimed at the company's CEO Jack Dorsey, ahead of the October 28 Commerce Committee hearing about censorship, at which he is scheduled to testify.
And it seems that Twitter is also using this as an opportunity to eject some 'undesirables' from their platform.
From The Daily Wire:
Twitter Locks Out WH Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany For Sharing NY Post Hunter Biden Story
By Jon Brown - Oct 15, 2020
Twitter locked the personal account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday after she shared a New York Post story alleging that Hunter Biden introduced his father to a Burisma executive a year before the former vice president pushed Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who was investigating the company.
In a screenshot disseminated by the Trump War Room, Twitter appeared to have sent McEnany a notification that her "account has been locked" for "violating our rules against distribution of hacked materials." McEnany's tweet was subsequently deleted. It remains unclear if McEnany was forced to delete it, or if Twitter deleted it for her.
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[Sen. Josh] Hawley called on the FEC to investigate whether Twitter and Facebook violated campaign finance law by interfering in the dissemination of the story. As The Daily Wire reported:
After citing the relevant section of the U.S. Code, Hawley said, "Twitter and Facebook are both corporations. A 'contribution' includes 'anything of value ... for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.'"
Hawley alleged that Facebook and Twitter's "active suppression" of the New York Post story "appears to constitute contributions under federal law," and that the Biden campaign "derives extraordinary value" from quashing a story that would link the former vice president to Ukrainian oligarchs.
Hawley also sent letters demanding answers to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. In his letter to Dorsey, Hawley said in part, "There are various reports circulating on Twitter of users unable to post a link to the New York Post story, with some users posting responses from Twitter that the content was deemed to be 'potentially spammy or unsafe.'"
"I find this behavior stunning but not surprising from a platform that has censored the President of the United States," Hawley added. Later, he demanded to know the specifics of how the company decided to suppress the story, as well as if anyone involved with the Biden-Harris campaign was involved.
But I imagine this story has gained more infamy now it's being surpressed.
Good ol' striesand effect.