Republicans lash out at Twitter and Facebook over Hunter Biden article

Some Republican lawmakers lashed out at Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday over the platforms’ decisions to limit the spread of a New York Post story about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The GOP lawmakers characterized the moves as censorship and renewed their allegations that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent letters to both Facebook and Twitter over their decisions to clamp down on the spread of the article.

"I find this behavior stunning but not surprising from a platform that has censored the President of the United States,” Hawley wrote to Twitter, seemingly referencing occasions when the platform has added labels to President Trump’s posts over misinformation.

“This statement raises questions about the applicability of your policy, especially because such a pre-emptive removal of a news story on such grounds—and the additional scrutiny you have applied—appears to be an unusual intervention that is not universally applied to all content,” Hawley added.

His letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey followed an earlier, similar letter he sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the decision to limit the spread of the Post’s story.

Trump piled onto the criticism as well and renewed his call to “REPEAL SECTION 230,” referring to a clause that protects social media platforms from being held liable for what is posted on their websites.

“So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” the president Tweeted.

Twitter prevented users from sharing links to the story in tweets or direct messages. A spokesperson for the company said the decision was made based on the platform’s hacked materials policy.

Facebook earlier in the day took action to limit the spread of the article, but the platform offered few details regarding those steps.

“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. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” policy communications manager Andy Stone tweeted.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also sent a letter to Twitter, and publicly bashed both social media giants over the decision to limit the spread of the story about Hunter Biden.

“Twitter’s censorship of this story” is “quite hypocritical” and accused it of being an “obvious and transparent attempt by Twitter to influence the upcoming Presidential election,” Cruz said.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, similarly accused the companies of trying to “help the Democrats” through their move to limit the spread of the story which had sparked questions over its sourcing.

“Big Tech claims they aren’t biased against Conservatives. So why are they suppressing speech to help the Democrats?” Jordan tweeted. “Section 230!”

House Judiciary Republicans also shared the story through the committee’s website after Twitter blocked users from tweeting the link.

The New York Post’s story published Wednesday includes allegations about former Vice President Biden and Ukraine that hinge on an email reportedly retrieved from the hard drive of a laptop dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.

An unnamed store owner, who reportedly could not identify the individual who dropped off the computer, is said to have provided a copy of the hard drive to the attorney of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who also personally legally represents President Trump, before it was seized by the FBI.

The Biden campaign told Politico in a statement that the Post never asked the campaign about “critical elements of this story.”

“They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani - whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported - claimed to have such materials,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates told Politico.

Bates also said the campaign reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedule from the time and “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”

“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath,” Bates said in the statement.

Spokespeople for Twitter and Facebook were not immediately available to comment in response to backlash from GOP lawmakers.

what a tale! lengthy, and on the money, but this bit also stands out!

13 Oct: The GrayZone: DC’s Atlantic Council raked in funding from Hunter Biden’s corruption-stained employer while courting his VP father
The shady arrangement between the Atlantic Council and Burisma – the gas company at the center of the ‘Ukrainegate’ scandal – is just one dubious deal out of many at a DC think tank that has become a clearinghouse for legal corruption.
by Max Blumenthal

Throughout Biden’s tenure as the “point person” on Ukraine, one figure was constantly by his side: Michael Carpenter, a former Pentagon specialist on Eastern Europe who became a key advisor to Biden on the National Security Council. When Carpenter traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015, he helped provide the Vice President with talking points throughout his trip.

Once Trump was inaugurated, Carpenter followed fellow members of the Democratic foreign policy apparatus into the think tank world. He accepted a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, and assumed a position as senior director of newly founded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which provided office space to Biden when he was in Washington.

At the January 23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where Biden made his now-notorious comments about threatening the Ukrainian government with the withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did not fire Shokin – “well son of a bitch, he got fired!” Biden exclaimed – Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough talking points about Russian interference...

In July 2018, for instance, (Carpenter) helped welcome Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), to a series of meetings on Capitol Hill.
Parubiy is the founder of the Social-National Party, which the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson described as “openly neo-fascist.” In fact, Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style uniform, packing a pistol beneath a Wolfsangel symbol on the cover of his Mein Kampf-style memoir, “A View From The Right.”

After the Senate meeting with Parubiy, I challenged Carpenter over bringing the far-right politician to Capitol Hill. “Andriy Parubiy is a conservative nationalist who is also a patriot who cares about his country,” Carpenter remarked to me. “I don’t think he has any neo-Nazi inclinations, nor background.” He went on to dismiss the basis of my question as “mostly Russian propaganda.”...

Asked by The Grayzone about Carpenter’s work for a think tank funded by Burisma while simultaneously involving himself in Biden’s political machine, Atlantic Council media relations deputy director Alex Kisling stated, “Council staff and fellows are free to participate in election activity as individuals and on their own time, provided they do so in a way that could not be seen as acting as a representative of the Council or implying Council endorsement of their activity or views. Michael’s affiliations and previous service are on our website. (He is not part of our full time staff).”

The Penn Biden Center did not respond to a question on whether it supported Carpenter’s work at the Burisma-backed Atlantic Council...

In an October 7 Washington Post op-ed denouncing Trump’s “smear campaign” against Biden, Carpenter insisted that Biden had gone to great lengths to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin, for his failure to take action against Burisma. That evening, Carpenter took to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to reinforce the message that Biden moved against “corrupt players” in Ukraine, presumably referring to Burisma.

At no point did he mention that Burisma was funding the think tank that hosted him as a senior fellow...
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/13/dcs-atlantic-council-raked-in-funding-from-hunter-bidens-corruption-stained-employer-while-courting-his-vp-father/

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