Last week the New York Post published a controversial article that presented emails that claimed Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, allegedly arranged meetings between a Ukrainian business man and his father while his father was Vice President.
Within a day Twitter began to censor the article and locked accounts that linked to the article. The Daily Wire reported that Twitter locked the Trump campaign’s Twitter account because of a post that quoted the article, comparing it to past statements made by Joe Biden contradicted by the Post’s article. Twitter placed a warning on the House Judiciary Committee Republican’s account when they linked to the article.
The reason these links were blocked was because of a policy that stated that Twitter would block ‘hacked’ content from their platform.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey eventually apologized for the platform’s actions, saying that ‘straight blocking of URLs was wrong,’ and that they have updated their policies to avoid these situations in the future. It was acknowledged that their previous policy could have had unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and news outlets.
Some in conservative circles have accused social media platforms like Twitter of biased censorship and have used this article as an example. Representative Mark Walker (R-NC) claimed that this action by Twitter was election interference.
Is this really biased censorship? Let’s look at an article published by the New York Times on September 27th. This article presented the tax returns of President Donald Trump for public dissemination.
The timing of the New York Times article, less than 40 days before the election, is as convenient as the Post’s, yet the Post’s article was blocked. Both the Post and Times relied on leaked information, but while the Times chose to cloak their source behind the shield of anonymity, as is their right, the Post was more open.
Why should we take the word of the Times that the documents they received were genuine? Since they have declined to provide the documents they relied on in order to protect their source, their article is much harder to fact check, while the Post provided the original source along with their article.
Among the information released were facts that would work against them, like the involvement of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon in the release of the emails. If they had simply published the emails and cloaked the source behind the shield of anonymity as the Times did, would the social media platforms have acted any differently?
Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, so why should information released by a legitimate news source be assumed false until proven accurate?
Sources: Innocent Until Proven Guilty
The Mill Review 