Republican members of Congress have announced a new investigation of social media companies Twitter and Facebook over their censorship of factual reporting, just before the 2020 election, about a scandal involving Hunter Biden, his overseas business deals, and Joe Biden’s possible involvement.
Those reports, first by the New York Post, were censored by the social media companies, despite their having no evidence they were false.
In fact, the reports have been verified multiple times now, with even skeptics at the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times conceding their accuracy.
But one survey by the Media Research Center suggested that had the information from the New York Post been more widely distributed, as would an ordinary story, enough Democrat voters would have withheld their support from Joe Biden that he would have lost the 2020 election.
Just the News confirmed, “At the time, Facebook and Twitter suppressed the Post’s article detailing of how Hunter Biden appeared to use his father’s position and influence for his and his family’s financial gain.”
Now, GOP members of the House Committee on the Judiciary, have written to both Facebook and Twitter calling on them to explain their actions to “interfere in free and fair election-related public discourse” on their platforms that worked “to the benefit of President Biden and the detriment of former President Trump.”
The letters charge the companies with knowingly “suppressing” First Amendment-protected activity.
The reporting detailed “how Hunter Biden used the position and influence of his father, now-President Biden, for personal gain, with the apparent awareness of President Biden,” the letters charge.
The companies, meanwhile, are accused of avoiding “any meaningful accountability.”
“As far as we know,” the lawmakers wrote, the compani9es never have “identified or explained” what was false about the reports.
“The Post article was likely to have significant implications for the presidential election. It detailed how Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s influence as then-Vice President for personal gain. When Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian company, a company executive asked him to ‘use [his] influence’ to stop a domestic Ukrainian investigation into Burisma. Another time, the same executive thanked Hunter Biden for arranging a meeting with then-Vice President Biden. Eight months after that, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Bjurisma, a firing about which Vice President Biden later bragged. The Post article challenged President Biden’s claim that he had ‘never spoke to [his] son about his overseas business dealings,” the letter said.
“It appears that Facebook knowingly and deliberately used its platform to control election-related information accessible to the American people shortly before the 2020 election, and that
Facebook did so to the primary benefit of then-Vice President Biden. Facebook’s actions helped shield Vice President Biden from increased scrutiny about the impropriety detailed in the Post article. In addition, Facebook’s actions gave rise to other news outlets, tech platforms, and even Biden himself dismissing the Post story as disinformation or untrue—when, in fact, it had never been rebutted. This irresponsible conduct demands a thorough investigation so that we may
understand how Big Tech wields its enormous power over the free flow of information to the detriment of free and fair elections.”
The letters include a list of questions to be answered, including a request for access to “all documents and communications” relating to the decision to censor the report.
The companies were given a deadline of April 14.
Signing the letter were Reps. Jim Jordan, Steve Chabot, Louie Gohmert, Darrell Issa, Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, Mike Johnson, Andy Biggs, Tom McClintock, W. Gregory Steube and others.
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