They censor the smoking gun on Biden: Twitter and Facebook are no longer neutral platforms (if they ever were)
Big Tech information coup! For some time Twitter and Facebook , with the excuse of the fight against fake news , have been operating a creeping but systematic censorship on the content posted by users on their platforms, and on the profiles of individuals and groups, but on Wednesday they crossed the Rubicon, making not only evident but their attempt to influence the American presidential campaign in favor of Joe Biden is striking (other than Russian interference!).
On Atlantico Quotidiano we have dealt with it many times, highlighting among the first the threat to freedom of information and expression on the web, but this is undoubtedly the most sensational censorship for times, methods and subjects involved.
On Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook decided to block their users from tweeting and sharing the New York Post investigation into Kievgate involving Joe Biden and son Hunter. Twitter has gone so far as to suspend the profile of the White House spokesperson and the official one of the GOP group in the House Justice Committee, in addition to many other pro-Trump.
The news that emerged from the New York Post investigation is that the Democratic presidential candidate lied when, in 2016, he denied ever having dealt with his son's business as vice president. The emails published by the newspaper show that Hunter Biden had introduced to his father an executive of Burisma , a company on whose board he sat and at the center of a corruption scandal in Ukraine. And it so happens that then vice president Biden then demanded and obtained from Kiev (there is a video in which he claims it) the removal of the prosecutor who was investigating that company. That the son of the vice president of the United States was paid millions of dollars, without having special skills, by that company raises the suspicion that the real "service" rendered had more to do with the possibility of intercession with Papa Biden, who then he would use his powers to get company and son out of trouble.
And from the emails published yesterday, also from NYPost , it also emerged that Hunter has entered into very profitable deals involving the largest Chinese energy company, including one that he believes would have been "interesting for me and my family".
But it is not here that we want to reconstruct the case and evaluate the NYPost scoop on the merits . The point is the censorship of content that is very relevant to public opinion less than three weeks after the vote for the White House. The attempt of the most influential social media to deny their users the opportunity to know and get an idea.
First of all, it should be remembered that the New York Post is the fourth largest US newspaper by circulation, not a tabloid newspaper or a white supremacist conspiracy paper .
This time the two social media were not satisfied with putting the "fake news" label on the tweets that relaunched the article, as happened in other cases to President Trump himself. They just censored, blocked the content. With a much weaker motivation: not being able to deny it as "false", Twitter argued that it is "material obtained illegally". Still, the same standard did not apply with the New York Times article on Trump's tax returns, certainly not obtained with the consent of the person concerned. Granted and not granted that NYPost illegally obtained Hunter Biden's emails, how many scoops do the big papers make by obtaining “legally” the material they publish?
The result is that while the New York Times article about Trump could be spread on social media less than 48 hours after the first presidential debate, that of the New York Post on Biden was brutally censored – and not even with the justification that it was a "false".
Another paradox of the censorship is that while it is not possible to tweet and share the inconvenient investigation on Biden, it is still possible to relaunch all the articles in the liberal press in which the NYPost scoop is challenged.
And what about what happened in 2016 and 2017 against Trump and his team with Russiagate , when the same Twitter and Facebook helped to amplify a case that turned out to be a disinformation operation of the Clinton Campaign ? What would we say today, if it happened with reversed parts?
Suffice it to recall how at the time Trump's “golden shower” hoax made the rounds of social media , just as the same people who had spread it – FBI and liberal media – already knew it was a hoax. Are the emails found on Biden's son's pc less credible than the Steele dossier?
A more recent example. Not even a month ago – as reported by Atlantico Quotidiano , perhaps the only one in Italy – Facebook censored two pro-Trump spots on the basis of a very questionable fact checking by PolitiFact , an organization that is not exactly impartial. The commercials were judged to be "mostly fake" , and therefore blocked, despite the claims contained were recognized as true by the authors themselves. In fact , from the report of the same fact checking , it emerged that according to some experts, Biden's tax plan will effectively translate into higher taxes for all income groups, as stated in the commercials with the statements of Biden himself. The problem was an unspecified lack of "context". In other words, the commercials said true things, but it was better not to know too much about it …
And how many of you know that in mid-September, not months ago, Twitter's head of Public Policy joined Biden's transition team ? And that former Democratic Vice President candidate Kamala Harris's former press secretary is one of Twitter's top communications managers?
All of this also explains why Biden can afford to run his campaign from the "basement" , from the basement. Not only the media – old and new – are in clear majority on his side, but they are militants in effective permanent service. They campaigned for him but also in his place, building the most favorable narrative. Who like Wallace, the moderator of the first debate, saving him the most uncomfortable questions. Who playing with fact checking and algorithms. And it won't end with November 3, they are ready to go further to ensure the final result, as evidenced by a disturbing statement by Mark Zuckerberg on September 8:
"What we and the other media need to start doing is preparing the american people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or weeks to make sure all the votes are counted".
If you add to these words that Facebook has already begun to censor posts on cases of suspected irregularities in the vote by post, there is really to be feared for what they are preparing …
The censorship of the New York Post article is the first clear and sensational, coordinated attempt by the two most powerful and widespread social media to influence an election.
Atlantico Quotidiano had warned from the beginning that investing social media to carry out the crusade against so-called "fake news" , pushing them to an invasive "moderation" of content, would lead to this, to politically motivated censorship. We started with fact checking of dubious impartiality and we arrived at pure and simple censorship. They do not want to fight fake news , traditional and social media such as Twitter and Facebook are demonstrating with their conduct that they aim at total control of the narrative and the monopoly of disinformation.
But now the question of the very nature of social media officially opens: if Twitter and Facebook can decide which contents of their users to block, which to favor in propagation and which to penalize, with their algorithms, as happens daily, then they are no longer platforms. neutral, simple channels of communication and information, but real publishers, who should therefore be subject to the regulations on publishing, while today Section 230 protects them from the legal consequences deriving from the contents published by their users.
As analyst Bruno Maçães observed, imagine that a telephone operator starts censoring your calls, dropping them every time a certain phrase is said. Would being able to move to another operator be enough to make you forget that a principle of freedom has been violated?
The argument that Twitter and Facebook are private companies, so they can "moderate" the content posted on their platforms as they want and dissatisfied users can simply move to other social networks , does not hold up. For two reasons. First, because then, as we said, they should be considered publishers, with all the consequences that this entails at the regulatory level. Second, because now most of the public debate takes place on these social networks , billions of people are informed and exchanged ideas through them, so it is unthinkable that this process will be subjected to censorship while we wait the necessary time, probably years, for which the competition does its job, that is, while some other more "open" social networks develop and spread.
What happened on Wednesday should sound like an alarm bell for those who support the need for an incisive policy of "moderation" of content by social platforms. Imagine that the censorship decided by Twitter and Facebook was also adopted by the other Big Techs , not to be outdone. That article would be nowhere to be found on the web. What would essentially distinguish our societies from China or Iran in terms of access to information and freedom of expression?
Also because, if there are reasons why you think that a certain content should be deleted from one platform, why should you think it can be allowed on another? It is obvious that for consistency it should be banned from all, and possibly from the web itself. Welcome to China.
The post Censoring the smoking gun on Biden: Twitter and Facebook are no longer neutral platforms (if they ever were) appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/censurano-la-smoking-gun-su-biden-twitter-e-facebook-non-sono-piu-piattaforme-neutrali-se-mai-lo-sono-state/ on Fri, 16 Oct 2020 03:45:00 +0000.