Facebook announced it will halt distribution of the New York Post’s breaking news detailing the discovery of emails concerning Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, even before the story is “independently fact-checked.”
The Post’s story details the discovery of a MacBook Pro with a “Beau Biden Foundation” sticker on it containing incriminating emails demonstrating that, despite his repeated denial, Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden was both aware of and involved in some of Hunter’s Ukrainian business dealings.
Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director and former staffer for multiple Democratic PACs, a senator and a congressman, announced the censorship on Twitter Wednesday morning, shortly after the publication of the story.
“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,” Stone tweeted.
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
While Stone does not specify who Facebook will be using as their third-party fact-checkers for this story, previous instances such as censoring pro-life videos, censoring articles from conservative media, and removing Trump campaign ads demonstrate Facebook’s biased methods to evaluate what they deem as “false” or “misleading” information.
The Biden Campaign has also previously attempted to leverage Facebook’s censorship abilities, requesting that they “remove posts from President Trump that suggest a connection between mail-in ballots and voter fraud.”
As others noted, Facebook’s intentional censorship of the Post story could be considered the very type of election interference they swear to fight against.
Holy bleeping bleep. Facebook explicitly admitting it is protecting Biden — and interfering in the presidential election — by censoring media outlets and limiting discussion of today's breaking news about Biden's engagement with Burisma. https://t.co/nF07qqyc5J
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 14, 2020
The mask is off.
Big tech is deploying its power to help Biden get elected, and this statement (from a former Democrat staffer no less) confirms it.
Not only is the platform intervening to protect Biden from a scandal, it is doing so *before* its "fact checkers" say anything. https://t.co/uGOgs3RbqW
— Allum Bokhari (@AllumBokhari) October 14, 2020
https://twitter.com/heckyessica/status/1316403621832073216?s=20
The idea that Facebook would brag about “pre-ducing” distribution even before a fact check shows how far we’ve come on this topic – a few years ago this would be the kind of thing James O’Keefe would uncover through secret recordings.
Now execs just…tweet it out… https://t.co/mRUNXQddJQ
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) October 14, 2020
Facebook says it is 'reducing [the] distribution' of the New York Post's report that Hunter Biden introduced an executive for the Ukrainian company that was paying him to his father when Joe Biden was vice president. https://t.co/MSBfgPvx2Q
— Byron York (@ByronYork) October 14, 2020
