October 15, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Twitter’s efforts Wednesday to suppress a New York Post article about Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter mark a “dark moment” for freedom of the press, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared in his evening monologue.
The ongoing debate over free speech on social media took on new urgency Wednesday when Twitter flagged as “potentially harmful” a report in the Post about emails indicating that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then the Vice President of the United States, to Vadym Pozharskyi, a top adviser to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, less than a year before the elder Biden openly pressured the Ukranian government to fire a prosecutor tasked with investigating the company.
The Post’s Twitter account has been locked, and numerous accounts have found themselves unable to tweet the link to the report. Those who could were treated to a generic “this link may be unsafe” disclaimer before being able to click through to the report. A Facebook representative said it was also “reducing its distribution on our platform.”
This is a Big Tech information coup. This is digital civil war.
I, an editor at The New York Post, one of the nation’s largest papers by circulation, can’t post one of our own stories that details corruption by a major-party presidential candidate, Biden. pic.twitter.com/BKNQmAG19H
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) October 14, 2020
I was able to tweet the @NYPost Biden article before Twitter started fully censoring it. That tweet is still up, but when you click on it this is what happens: pic.twitter.com/ercl5V7TDf
— Calvin Freiburger (@CalFreiburger) October 14, 2020
“This was mass censorship on a scale that America has never experienced in 245 years, and it's a threat to all of us,” Carlson said Wednesday evening. “Democracies only function when there is a free exchange of information between citizens. We no longer have that.”
In response to the ensuing uproar, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the company’s “communication around our actions” was “not great,” and Twitter claimed the report was censored because it contained images that “include personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers,” and violated the company’s prohibition on “hacked materials” (the Post denies that the emails were obtained via hacking, and Twitter does not generally suppress stories about illicitly-obtained personal information, such as President Donald Trump’s tax returns).
“They didn't apologize for doing this,” Carlson said. “They didn't bother to make up reasonable-sounding justifications for it. They just did it, exactly as the Chinese government does. These are monopolies. They have all the power, you have none. They don't have to care about what you think and they don't.”
“You can see why Facebook and Twitter don't want to allow you to read it,” Carlson continued. “If Joe Biden met with Burisma executives at the request of his son for the profit of his own family, it becomes very clear that Joe Biden's previous denials were lies. Just last year, Joe Biden was telling us he had no idea what his son was doing for Burisma.”
Various Republican lawmakers have demanded Twitter and Facebook explain themselves under oath, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has called on the Federal Elections Commission to investigate whether their suppression of the story, less than a month before the presidential election, qualifies as an illegal in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign.