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A dangerous precedent when social media giants stop established journalism
Of: Mattias Beijmo
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This is a cultural article which is part of Aftonbladet’s opinion journalism.
Twitter did not allow the dissemination of a story about Joe Biden and possible contacts in Ukraine.
New York Post It is not only one of the most important newspapers in the United States, with its 219 years on the neck it is perhaps also the oldest. On Wednesday, the newspaper published a revelation based on the leaked email correspondence from 2015.
The article says that Joe bidens son, Hunter, he used his connection to his father to earn money and power in the Ukrainian business community. The connection with the father, then vice president of the United States, has been an important link for Ukraine in influencing the Obama administration’s view of the country and its relationship with its Russian neighbor.
At the time Hunter Biden has been a board member of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma and received $ 50,000 a month for the problem, this without any prior experience or connection to the energy industry.
All this is known from before, the “new” is that Joe Biden must have been involved in contacts with the Ukrainians. Joe Biden has denied having contact with Burisma, but according to the New York Post, the material in the email shows that he is lying.
The material, according to the newspaper, will come from a laptop that Hunter Biden “forgot” to pick up from a computer repairman. When the technician discovered what was on the hard drive, he must have left it up to the newspaper.
When the New York Post Once the story was published, three things happened. More liberal-oriented journalists took to social media; the story was false, it should be silenced to death. Then, just two hours after the publication, the Facebook spokesperson (and before this former employee of the Democrats) announced that they would activate the algorithms and “limit” the dissemination of the article on their platform.
Then Twitter went one, or rather ten, steps further.
Twitter completely blocked the spread of the link, including in private messages, and completely blocked the New York Post account. The New York Post then tried to publish the content under a new link to its newspaper, but Twitter also blocked it. Anyone who tried to share links to the article received an error message or that the link led to “harmful content”.
Criticisms of social media companies The censorship is huge now, as is the CEO of Twitter. Jack dorsey he is summoned to the Senate for questioning. The matter became even more heated when Twitter justified its decision by saying that the material arrived by piracy, and they assure that they have a long-standing policy not to spread that type of journalism.
A somewhat surprising attitude: Chelsea mannings leaked photos of American war crimes, Snowdens Global Mass Surveillance Revelations, WikiLeaks Revelations, The Panama Leak – Is Twitter’s New Attitude That Such Disclosures Are Wrong And Should Be Silenced?
And it is strange that Twitter, despite its supposed policy, happily allows links to other contemporary articles directly recovered from illegally encrypted documents.
An example is the pro-democracy revelations of the New York Times about President Trump’s tax evasion. Jack Dorsey has not commented on his political views, he has personally censored some of them. Triumphs tweets, but that he would piss on the United States Constitution during a fiery election campaign is still a bit unexpected. And stupid.
Maybe it’s anyway Mark Zuckerbergs acting even more contradictory. The New York Post may be owned by the conservative and controversial media mogul Rupert murdochBut the journalists who claim to have received the hard drive by email are established and respected within the body.
Zuckerberg’s team justifies their algorithmic censorship of the article by saying they want to “verify” it in peace and quiet, and here a gigantic irony emerges. The real-time media Facebook, led by a man who for years has deliberately allowed lies and conspiracy theories in the name of free speech, now want to press pause and verify the facts? You close the door to your own smelly backyard and embark on an article with totally legitimate, yet sensational news.
All this as a spate of conspiracies from QAnon on Democrats, such as pedophiles and child murderers, rages on the Facebook feed.
Of course they have New emails, if any, have been obtained using “illegal” methods. The revelation that the Russian intelligence service GRU hacked into Burisma’s email server came as early as January, and US security analysts say they have been hearing reports about the findings from the Russians for months. Now it is, as with Hillary clinton email 2016, the perfect time to release them.
But even if they come from Hunter Biden’s “forgotten” computer, the actions of Twitter and Facebook are a paradigm shift. Today’s newspapers are completely dependent on social media distribution to come up with revelations and news.
If Facebook and Twitter decide that established journalistic methods are not acceptable, new censorship laws will be created harmful to Internet media. We will only get the disclosures that fit the financial agenda and goals of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. It breaks everything on which the democratic idea of investigative journalism is based.
And the risk now is that even more people are turning against the establishment that Trump so successfully described as the main enemy in the 2016 election. Perhaps Jack Dorsey shot himself in the foot and gave Donald Trump the “October surprise.” “the last chance for victory that he so badly needs. ?
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