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WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee announced Thursday they are launching a new investigation into social media giants Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of a damaging story about presidential son Hunter Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, in light of recent admissions by mainstream media outlets vindicating the story.

The subject of the Biden family’s financial gains from international influence-peddling started drawing mainstream notice in early 2020, when Democrats tried (and failed) to impeach former President Donald Trump for asking the Ukrainian government to help investigate current President Joe Biden’s role, as Barack Obama’s Vice President, in the ouster of a prosecutor who had been investigating Hunter’ business dealings in the country. 

Months later, the New York Post released a series of bombshell reports about a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, which contained scores of emails and texts detailing how the Biden family made millions of dollars through Hunter’s facilitation of meetings between his father and business interests around the world. Democrats tried to dismiss the story as “misinformation,” while their allies in traditional and social media worked to suppress word from getting out.

The Biden camp never specifically denied the authenticity of the material, but its allies including Facebook and Twitter took steps to suppress the story under the pretext of “misinformation” and “hacked materials,” despite abundant corroboration.

More than a year after Biden’s victory over Trump, left-wing media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post have finally begun to admit the authenticity of the material from the laptop, prompting calls for a reevaluation of the original decisions to censor it.

On Thursday, Judiciary Republicans released letters sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal notifying them of investigation into both platforms’ “actions to interfere in free and fair election-related public discourse” to the “benefit of President Biden and the detriment of former President Trump.”

The letters seek a range of documents and communications pertaining to the platforms’ decisions to suppress the story and any potential communications between them and the Biden campaign or the Democrat National Committee, as well as any documents on why their actions were not reportable to the Federal Election Commission as in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign and explanations as to why their actions did not constitute “publisher function[s]” for the purpose of Section 230 liability immunity under the federal Communications Decency Act.

Lacking prosecutorial power, the Republican investigation is not likely to bring about any meaningful change or consequences among Big Tech, but will continue to call attention to the issue ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. 48% of Americans believe the story could have changed the outcome of the last presidential election, according to Rasmussen.

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