Hunter Biden and the shame of social media
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/hunter-biden-and-the-shame-of-social-media
Hunter Biden and the shame of social media
HUNTER BIDEN AND THE SHAME OF SOCIAL MEDIA. Today the New York Times
Deep in the story, the 24th paragraph, to be exact, the paper reported that prosecutors have "examined emails between Mr. Biden, [business partner Devon] Archer, and others about [Ukrainian energy firm] Burisma and other foreign business activity." The New York Times has seen the emails in question. It obtained them "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop." Those emails, the New York Times continued, "were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation."
The New York Times article comes as something of a bitter joke for the New York Post, which on Oct. 14, 2020, published a story headlined, "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad." The New York Post reported that the email was "contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer" that had been brought to a Delaware repair shop in April 2019.
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The bitterness in the story is that the New York Post
Some of the treatment was downright comic.
It was all so mysterious! Of course, if more news organizations, including the New York Times, had reported the details of the laptop story, more viewers would have known exactly what Trump was talking about.
So it's fair to say that
Facebook said it applied its "process to reduce the spread of misinformation" to the laptop story. "While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners," tweetedFacebook spokesman Andy Stone. "In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform." The "fact-checking" claim was, apparently, a ruse. Facebook never published the results of any fact-checking done on the article.
Twitter was even worse. The company banned the New York Post from the platform and blocked the story itself on Twitter. It also banned Twitter users from tweeting the story and even from sending it to one another via direct message. If one happened to find a link to the story on Twitter, a click brought this screen:
Now, of course, it's all one big Never Mind. Except no one can go back and undo the damage Twitter and Facebook did. And the power the two social media giants exercised only served to heighten their already-strong inclination for censorship and cancellation. In the end, the new New York Times story on Hunter Biden says a little about Hunter Biden and a lot about some deeply troubling trends in our media world.
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