'Freedom dies': Media, Big Tech interfere in 2020 election

FPI / October 16, 2020

The corporate media, Facebook and Twitter had no problem covering and amplifying for the better part of three years the phony Trump-Russia collusion story.

The New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize for its misleading and false "coverage."

But when the New York Post published its blockbuster on the Bidens and the selling of political influence, the major media wanted only to discredit it and advised their readers and viewers to ignore it. Twitter and Facebook went to great lengths to hide the story from their users.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said: "This is election interference, and we are 19 days out from an election. Never before have we seen active censorship of a major press publication with serious allegations of corruption of one of the two candidates for president."

The Senate Judiciary Committee said it plans to issue a subpoena on Tuesday to Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey. The subpoena would require Dorsey to testify on Oct. 23 before the committee, according to the Republicans who announced the hearing.

"If the New York Times and other media outlets in 2016 had made the same effort they’ve made in today’s attempt to poke holes in the Post report, the bogus Russia collusion story would have died before Donald Trump even took office," the Wall Street Journal's James Freeman noted.

New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote on Thursday: "The past four years have seen left-of-center outlets devote millions of column inches to anti-Trump stories that turned out to be utter bunk — yet neither Facebook nor Twitter took similar action as part of any 'standard process.' "

The Times wasn't the only outlet to "suddenly become cautious about reporting on the foreign relationships of presidential candidates," Freeman noted.

Kyle Griffin of MSNBC opined: "No one should link to or share that NY Post ‘report’. You can discuss the obvious flaws and unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be disinformation."

Sounding like a traditional publisher rather than a manager of an open communications network, Facebook’s Andy Stone tweeted: "While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform."

Twitter blocked its users from sharing the Post story with a note saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

Twitter also censored the New York Post's follow-up story on Thursday. The story includes emails which reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in on behalf of his family with a Chinese energy company.

Twitter had also censored an official press release from House Judiciary Committee Republicans after they re-posted the bombshell New York Post story. The Federalist noted that the link originally tweeted by the House Judiciary Committee Twitter has been reinstated and appears to be working again, "coincidentally soon after Sen. Ted Cruz announced the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Tuesday to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and that he will testify next Friday."

Rep. Jody Hice, Georgia Republican, tweeted: "Big Tech isn't even trying to hide it. They're bending over backwards to protect @JoeBiden & interfere in America's election. Monopolies like @Twitter & @Facebook have the power to sway the outcome by censoring information. @GOPoversight and I are demanding emergency action."

Hice and nine other GOP representatives sent a letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee chair Carolyn Maloney requesting an "emergency hearing on Big Tech's repeated efforts to interfere in the 2020 election."

The New York Post's Ahmari noted: "This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century: not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the Internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate."

Ahmari added: "The Post will continue to chase the truth wherever it takes us. But this episode should alarm ­every American. A very few people can unaccountably shape what you read. This is how freedom dies."

Free Press International