Trump slams Facebook, Twitter for censorship of Joe Biden’s critical article. (FILE)
Washington:
US President Donald Trump berated Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose the corrupt transactions of rival Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine.
The newspaper said it obtained a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden that involved his father in his business affairs in Ukraine.
The former vice president – the Democratic candidate in the November 3 election – has repeatedly denied such involvement.
“Steamy email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to daddy VP,” the newspaper read.
With Biden’s campaign denying ever meeting the businessman, Facebook and Twitter have placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there are questions about its veracity.
“It’s part of our standard process to reduce the spread of disinformation,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said.
Twitter said it was limiting dissemination of the article due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article.
Republicans, however, were outraged by what they called partisan censorship.
Trump, who follows Biden in the polls 20 days before the presidential election, lambasted the two social media giants.
“So terrible that Facebook and Twitter told the story of the ‘Smoking Gun’ emails linked to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son Hunter in @NYPost,” Trump posted on Twitter.
“This is just the start for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician.”
– Abandoned computer –
The New York Post said the computer was left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019.
The unidentified store owner told the newspaper that after the computer seemed to have been forgotten, he copied the hard drive and gave the machine to federal authorities.
The store owner passed the copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, who provided it to the newspaper.
While the Biden campaign has not denied the existence of the computer or the validity of the emails it contains, Giuliani has a history of spreading disinformation about Bidens and the Ukraine.
In September, the US Treasury said that a “source” Giuliani had met on several occasions, Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach, “had been an active Russian agent for over a decade.”
The Post criticized Facebook and Twitter for helping Biden’s election campaign, saying no one disputed the truth of the story.
“Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They are propaganda machines,” he wrote in an editorial.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley, in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said the “apparently selective blocking” suggested bias on Facebook’s part. “
The Post’s report, he said, is “clearly relevant to the public interest” and reveals “potentially unethical activity by a presidential candidate.”
– Business in Ukraine –
“Twitter’s censorship of this story is pretty hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share less well-rounded and critical reporting of other candidates,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz said in a letter to to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The story has rekindled criticism of the past two years that Joe Biden, when in charge of Ukrainian politics in the Obama administration, took steps to help his son and the Ukrainian energy company of which Hunter Biden served on the board. board of directors, Burisma.
Biden has repeatedly rejected such allegations. “I never spoke to my son about his foreign trade relations,” he declared categorically in September 2019.
The story focused on an April 2015 email, in which a Burisma board adviser named Vadym Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for inviting him to a meeting in Washington with his father.
But there was no indication when the meeting was scheduled or if it had ever taken place.
“We looked at Joe Biden’s official schedules at the time and no meeting, as the New York Post claims, ever took place,” the Biden campaign said.
Trump’s campaign, struggling to overcome a large vote deficit for Biden ahead of the election, quickly released a campaign statement claiming the emails were proof that Biden “lied to the American people” about his business dealings. son.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
