Freedom of the Press
Anybody ever heard of Twitter? You know that social media thing that the President uses to irritate and torment his detractors when he has insomnia in the middle of the night. How about Facebook? The college dating app created by Mark Zuckerberg because he was such a nerd, and apparently spent far too many nights alone.
Seems our pals at Twitter and Facebook took aim at the Nation’s oldest newspaper, the New York Post, last week when they published shocking revelations about emails and photos found on the Apple laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. They squashed the story and only after tremendous pressure from outraged politicians, it finally appeared on their platforms.
Appears this genius, Hunter, took the laptop into a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware and forget to get it back. Signed receipts for the repair work exist, as does a receipt from the FBI when they took it last December.
The store has a policy that if you don’t claim an item left for repair and pay for it within a specific period of time, the store owns it. Months went by and “Where’s Hunter”? It became the property of the Mac repair shop. The owner, now proven not to be a Russian asset, examined the hard drive and found some salacious, unbecoming photos and what appeared to be some emails about dealings with foreign governments, specifically the Ukrainians, Russians and Chinese. He made a copy of the hard drive before alerting the FBI.
Now the New York Times can post to Twitter and Facebook, a story on Trump’s income taxes based on unnamed sources and documents it won’t disclose. But evidently the New York Post cannot post its story on Biden based on actual documents it produced from the hard drive. This, in a sense, abridges freedom of the press. But the internet companies are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
What? It says that; "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider". Basically, it protects Twitter and Facebook from being sued for failure to publish something that they consider to be harmful. This gives them enormous power to dictate what is and isn’t seen by users. In a nutshell, they think the Biden story is harmful, but Trump’s taxes aren’t.
Twitter suspended the Post’s account when it published links to their story. It remains so currently. They also blocked the account of the White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she attempted to publish the story link. This is raw unadulterated censorship that would be appropriate in Stalinist Russia or the current regime in Communist China. Not to be outdone, Facebook also blocked the story. Anybody recall them suppressing stories about some of the scandalous stories or tweets about President Trump?
The New York Post story was released six days ago. The Biden campaign as of today has still not disputed a single fact in the story. Although Congressman Adam Schiff claims that this is Russian inference in our electoral process. We all know how dialed-in he is to national security. Right. The man has been proven wrong a number of times and now by Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who declared that his allegations are without any basis in fact.
If the New York Post stories, censored by Twitter and Facebook weren’t accurate, Joe Biden and his campaign spokespeople would be shouting their outrage from the rooftops and suing the paper for libel. Not a peep. The largely liberal “In-the-tank for Joe” print and broadcast media outlets would have ripped the contents of the Post story to shreds by now, point by point. Liberal fact checkers would be joyous, falling over each other to be the first to bust the Post story as fiction. Nothing like this has occurred.
When a CBS reporter Bo Erickson, had the stones to ask about the laptop and ensuring scandal, Joe went ballistic on him for asking. “I know you’d ask it," he snapped. "I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask." Bo is not known as a Trump acolyte; in fact, you can’t find any reporter at CBS who is. The major National press correspondents for paper and broadcast outlets have only seen fit to ask what flavor ice cream Joe and his granddaughter were having the other day.
Facebook and Twitter did not block his answer, “Vanilla and Chocolate”.