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- US President Donald Trump has criticized social media platforms for blocking an article criticizing Joe Biden.
- The New York Post article claims that Hunter Biden introduced his father Joe to Vadym Pozharskyi.
- The source of the information is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.
US President Donald Trump rebuked Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday for blocking links to a New York Post article that purported to expose corrupt dealings by election rival Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine.
The newspaper said it had obtained a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in his business affairs in Ukraine.
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The former vice president, the Democratic candidate for the November 3 election, has repeatedly denied any such involvement.
“Smoking gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced the Ukrainian businessman to his vice president father,” read the newspaper’s headline.
As the Biden campaign denied that it had met the businessman, Facebook and Twitter placed restrictions on links to the article, saying there were doubts about its veracity.
“This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone.
Indignant
Twitter said it was limiting circulation of the article due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article.
Republicans were outraged by what they called partisan censorship.
Trump, who follows Biden in polls 20 days before the presidential election, criticized the two social media giants.
“So terrible that Facebook and Twitter removed the story from the ‘Smoking Gun’ emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, on @NYPost,” Trump posted on Twitter.
“It is just the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician.”
At a later rally in Iowa, Trump said his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s Twitter account was blocked after she shared the Post’s story.
“Because she is reporting the truth! They closed her account,” Trump said.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lamented how Twitter communicated what it was doing with the article.
“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking url sharing via tweets or DM without context on why we are blocking: unacceptable,” he tweeted.
Disinformation
The New York Post said Hunter Biden had left the computer at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019.
The unidentified store owner told the newspaper that after the computer appeared to have been forgotten, he copied the hard drive and turned the machine over to federal authorities.
The store owner passed the hard drive copy to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, who gave it to the newspaper.
While the Biden campaign did not deny the existence of the computer or the validity of the emails it contains, Giuliani has a history of spreading disinformation about Bidens and Ukraine.
In September, the US Treasury said that a “source” Giuliani met several times, Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach, “has been an active Russian agent for more than a decade.”
The Post criticized Facebook and Twitter for helping Biden’s election campaign, saying no one has questioned the veracity 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 “seemingly selective blocking” suggests bias on Facebook. “
The Post report, he said, is “clearly relevant to the public interest” and reveals “potentially unethical activity by a presidential candidate.”
“Twitter’s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share reports from less appropriate sources that are critical of other candidates,” said Republican Senator Ted Cruz in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. .
The story revived criticism from the past two years that Joe Biden, when he was in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, took steps to help his son and the Ukrainian energy company on whose board of directors Hunter Biden sat, Burisma.
Biden has repeatedly denied such accusations.
“I have never talked to my son about his business abroad,” he said flatly in September 2019.
The story centered 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 ever happened.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official hours from the moment and no meeting, as the New York Post alleges, ever took place,” Biden’s campaign said.
The Trump campaign, struggling to overcome a strong poll deficit with Biden before the election, quickly released a campaign statement saying the emails were proof that Biden “lied to the American people” about his son’s business .
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