Tag: social media

Censoring the Biden story: How social media becomes state media

Chinese citizens watched President Xi Jinping deliver an important speech this week not far from Hong Kong. Well, not the whole speech: Xi apparently is ill, and every time he went into coughing spasms, China’s state media cut away so that he would be shown only in perfect health.

Xi’s coughs came to mind as Twitter and Facebook prevented Americans from being able to read the New York Post’s explosive allegations of influence-peddling by Hunter Biden. The articles cited material reportedly recovered from a laptop; it purportedly showed requests for Hunter Biden to use his influence on his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, as well as embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden.

Many of us have questioned the sketchy details of how the laptop reportedly was left by Hunter Biden with a nearly blind computer repairman and then revealed just weeks before the presidential election. There are ample reasons to question whether this material was the product of a foreign intelligence operation, which the FBI apparently is investigating.

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Facebook labels 2+2=4 “misinformation”

On the 5th of October, the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed “about 10%” of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.

He said it, we reported it. The maths is not disputable. And yet Facebook has flagged it as “misinformation”…

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Twitter Locks Account of Republican Senate Candidate Lauren Witzke – Again

Twitter has once again censored the Republican candidate for Delaware’s U.S. Senate seat, Lauren Witzke, over a tweet drawing attention to the consequences of mass immigration for Europe.

As Breitbart News previously reported, Witzke has already been locked out of her Twitter once this month.

The far-left platform, whose CEO, Jack Dorsey, will likely be subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee next week over its censorship of the New York Post’s bombshell Biden-Ukraine story, said the tweet constituted “hateful conduct.”

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‘Die in a fire’: Twitter employees reveal deep hatred for Trump

The tweets are running the asylum.

Twitter’s senior executives have a long history of anti-Trump hatred, a Post review of dozens of accounts of top employees found.

The venom, vitriol and, in some cases, vows to help Joe Biden across the finish line in next month’s presidential election continue to live online as the company earlier this week decided to censor The New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s emails to a consultant for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

“GET HIM OUT,” posted a senior site reliability engineer on Aug. 18. “What a f–king baboon.”

One manager with almost nine years on the job said he was quite keen to watch Biden “crush [Trump] in the election” and that he hoped the president would “be utterly humiliated while also suffering greatly from #COVID19.” In another post he fantasized about the president being put on a ventilator.

He calls Trump “a f–king idiot” and the voters who elected him — “hysterically f–king stupid people.”

At the same time the employee has been a consistent cheerleader of his company’s efforts to rein in the president on the platform and curb the spread of “misinformation.”

“I’m really proud of how quickly we’ve worked to make this possible for the US elections,” he wrote.

Others publicly wish the president harm.

One Twitter engineering manager said Trump should “die in a fire” in a January 2017 tweet. A year later, he rang in the new year by saying “Happy 2018! Donald Trump is dead!”

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New York Post says Twitter is holding its account hostage as paper is told it must delete links to Hunter Biden email story even though site lifted ban on sharing bombshell report

The New York Post’s Twitter account remains locked as the social media giant demands the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid delete six tweets linking to its stories on Hunter Biden’s emails. 

As of Saturday morning, the Post’s Twitter feed shows that it has not posted a story since Wednesday.

A Twitter representative told the newspaper that while the site has lifted restrictions that banned users from circulating the link to the Biden story, the Post is still required to remove the tweets so that it could use its account.

‘While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively,’ a Twitter rep told the Post on Friday in an email.

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Facebook and Twitter’s Intervention Highlights Dangerous New Double Standard

The only thing that should matter, when it comes to stories like this, is whether or not the material is true and in the public interest. This disturbing new confederation of media outlets and tech firms is rewriting that standard.

The optics of a former Democratic Party spokesman suddenly donning a Facebook official’s hat to announce a ban of a story damaging to Democrats couldn’t be worse. Moreover, the Orwellian construct described in papers like the Times suggests that for tech executives, pundits, and Democratic Party officials alike, the lines between fake news and bad news, between actual misinformation and information that is merely politically adverse, have been blurred. It’s no longer clear that some of these people see a meaningful distinction between the two ideas.

The public can’t help but see this. While papers like the Times denounce the true Podesta emails as “misinformation,” and Facebook says the New York Post story must be kept out of sight until verified, the standard for, say, the Steele dossier was and is opposite. In that case, we were told “raw intelligence” should be published so that “Americans can make up their own minds” about information that, while “salacious and unverified,” may still be freely read on Twitter and Facebook, reported on in the New York Times and Washington Post, and talked about on NBC, so long as it has not been completely “disproven.”

As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post points out, even that last point is no longer true, but the Steele dossier and plenty of other products of what Axios calls “hack and leak” journalism continue to be embraced and freely distributed. The obvious double-standard guarantees that the tech platforms will henceforth be viewed by a huge portion of the population as political censors instead of standards enforcers, and moreover that mainstream press pronouncements about such controversies will be deemed automatically untrustworthy by that same population.

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