By Morgan Chapman, Staff Writer
This article was originally featured in our special election 2020 magazine, (p.5) released 16 November 2020, which you can view here.
Hunter Biden and his guardian tech angel, Jack Dorsey.
Over the past few months leading up to the election, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have both used their control over the public’s access to information to silence conservatives. Any information that these companies deem as ‘disinformation’ (in other words, anything negative about Joe Biden) is swiftly ‘fact checked’ or censored outright.
Most notably, on October 15th, the New York Post published a breaking exposé story on Joe Biden’s son Hunter concerning his emails with an energy executive in Ukraine. Facebook quickly took steps to limit the spread of the article and said it would be fact checked. Meanwhile, Twitter took an even more aggressive step by disabling the Post’s Twitter account while also not allowing users to share the article. No matter your political views, this should concern you.
In this era of “cancel culture”, exceptional journalism that searches for the truth is dying. The NY Post was transparent about where they obtained this information on Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukraine while his father was Vice president.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was taken to a computer repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019 which never got picked up. The shop owner was concerned about the information he found on the laptop, and alerted the FBI, who obtained it in December 2019. He also made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Robert Costello, Rudy Guiliani’s lawyer, who later notified the NY Post about it in late September.
It makes utterly no sense at all why Hunter Biden, who in fact was receiving $50,000 a month in salary from the energy firm, introduced his father, who was VP at the time, to Vadym Pozharskyi , an advisor to the board of Burisma.
All the facts were there in the NY Post story, with clear pictures of the documents and the emails, which prove that Joe Biden lied about his involvement with Ukraine. From a journalistic standpoint, this is a “right to know” story for the American public as it is breaking news about a presidential candidate who is running in the election, and could be the country’s next president.
Ultimately, what stands out more to me is how the media, big tech companies and the ruling elites of the Democratic Party are so visibly trying to hide this story from the public’s view; not the single Hunter Biden scandal. Twitter and Facebook are purposely covering up this highly important information that the public has the right to know, all because they support Biden and hate Trump.
What happened to fair reporting and the “marketplace of ideas” in journalism?
I was appalled that two of the biggest tech companies in our country did this. The fact that huge media and technology companies continue to censor other viewpoints, particularly conservative, should make the American people concerned about what is at stake for the future of America. America is so unique because our country has freedom of speech in a democracy, unlike many countries, like China where citizens have major limits on their freedom of speech.
It is not the job for big tech giants to censor and fact check stories which is a total suppression of our freedom of speech. George Orwell said it himself: truth is the new hate speech . Truth in this day and age is anything that conflicts with the mainstream narrative. Unfortunately, that is the reality today. The more society sways away from the truth, the more it hates those who speak it.
Pure Hypocrisy
CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and The New York Times regularly publish unsubstantiated claims about Trump. Neither Twitter nor Facebook ever attempt to limit people’s access to those articles.
The New York Times falsely reported in 2017 that the Trump campaign was involved with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The media went crazy, labeling it “one of the biggest scandals in American history” and big tech companies did nothing to censor or fact check it. In addition, the Times published a “bombshell” story about Trump’s tax returns on September 27. There was no skepticism about it and no one even questioned the facts of the article. Yet, big tech and the media attack the New York Post, another major newspaper in America, on its Hunter Biden story that is equally as important for Americans to read.
As one of the most recognized newspapers in America that prides itself on its slogan, “all the news that’s fit to print”, The New York Times truly has an immense opposition to that, and the fiasco with Senator Cotton’s opinion piece published in June that their staff chose to take down is not representative of the journalistic values The New York Times claims to believe in. Overall, the Hunter Biden story exposed the tech giants of Silicon Valley and their efforts to protect Biden at every cost. This is not about politics, but the power that Twitter and Facebook have to tell people what to read and what not to read. There needs to be more discussion about this or else America will keep transforming into a controlled dystopian society where big tech controls everyone.
Morgan Chapman is a sophomore studying Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communications. She is from Briafcliff Manor, NY.