National Review Online
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
This morning, Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy
communications manager (and, per his bio, a former staffer for Barbara Boxer, the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the House Majority PAC),
announced that the social-media giant would begin “reducing” the “distribution”
of a New York Post investigation into emails purporting that Joe Biden
met with a top executive from the Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings
at the behest of his son Hunter Biden.
Bad idea.
In one of the emails reported by the Post, a
Burisma executive named Vadym Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for inviting him to
Washington to meet with the vice president in 2015.
If the Post report is to be believed, the
Biden-Burisma meeting occurred less than a year before the vice president
pressured Ukrainian officials to fire Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor investigating
the company that was paying Hunter $50,000 per month for his alleged expertise.
That is, by any journalistic standard, newsworthy.
Instead of simply asking pertinent questions, or
debunking the Post’s reporting, a media blackout was initiated. A number
of well-known journalists warned colleagues and their sizable social-media
audiences not to share the story.
By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in
suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with
followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It
locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Post,
and many others for retweeting the story.
There is no credible reason for this kind of targeted
suppression. Over the past five years there have been scores of dramatic scoops
written by major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and CNN that were based on faulty information provided by unknown
sources that turned out to be incorrect. Not once has Facebook or Twitter
concerned itself with the sourcing methods of reporters. Not once did it censor
any of those pieces.
Even today, Twitter users are free to share stories that
rely on the Steele Dossier, which includes the Donald Trump “pee-tape” myth,
despite the fact that we now know it was likely disinformation dropped into the
media stream by a foreign power.
Twitter initially cited its “Hacked Materials Policy” and
a “lack of authoritative reporting” as justification for censoring the Post,
one of the most widely read papers in the nation. Though the reliability of the
story is yet to be determined, Twitter has offered no evidence that any of the
information was illegally obtained. No similar standard was applied when the New
York Times published Trump’s tax returns, even though anyone who had legal
access to them is likely to have broken the law in sharing them with the Times.
The newspaper reports that Hunter Biden’s emails had turned up in the hard
drive of a laptop that had been dropped off at a repair shop last year. The FBI
is reportedly in possession of the hard drive.
Whatever the case, it’s all in the public record now. A
healthy democracy with a properly functioning and independent press would
debate, investigate, and rigorously factcheck new information. They wouldn’t work
to squelch a story. It’s certainly not the job of giant tech companies who
claim to function as neutral platforms to decide what news consumers can or
can’t handle.
The most generous reading of Twitter and Facebook’s
actions is that the rules are evolving, messy, and inadvertently unfair. A less
generous — but more plausible — reading is that the tech giants single out
specific stories damaging to progressives’ preferred presidential candidate.
It will backfire. For one thing, it further damages the
reputation of Big Tech. For another, it renders the industry more susceptible
to a new regulatory regime already being championed by some in Congress.
Mostly, however, it just makes the story they’re trying to suppress a far
bigger deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment