The social media behemoths have been violating Section 230 of Communications Decency Act for years now with impunity.
The law states that the platforms can retain immunity from regulators only if they don’t act as “publishers” — that is, if they merely allow people to post content and freely exchange ideas, like they were designed to do.
But the minute they started censoring any content, which has mostly been conservative content, that constituted a violation of Section 230, and they should have had their immunity pulled.
Of course, they haven’t been punished one iota. Not a single federal agency — the Federal Communications Commission comes to mind — has punished or fined any social media giant that has censored content.
So it should come as no surprise, then, that both Facebook and Twitter have gotten away with censoring the biggest political scandal of the current presidential election cycle: Massive corruption allegedly implicating — who else? — the current Democratic presidential contender and his family.
By now, you’ve read about the bombshell evidence presented by the New York Post last week against Hunter Biden and his former vice president father, Joe Biden, alleging corrupt deals and family payoffs involving firms in Ukraine and China, specifically, but also other countries too, we’re learning.
The Post’s first report came on Wednesday. The report cited actual evidence from the hard drive of a laptop computer once owned by Hunter Biden. There were emails, photos and video contained on the laptop featuring Hunter Biden and others. There was evidence of crackpipe use; raucous sex; and even some other potentially disgusting evidence involving underage girls.
But no sooner than the bombshell story began making rounds on social media, Facebook and Twitter executives — in Facebook’s case, a former Democratic Party operative — limited distribution of the story or censored it altogether.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want 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,” Facebook’s communications director Andy Stone announced (on Twitter!).
https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000
Twitter officials did the same thing on that platform. And why? Because they claimed that the information could be fraudulent and thus, subject to ‘fact-check’ — though no such standards apply to any story from any mainstream media source that disparages the president of the United States, Donald Trump, or Republicans, sans evidence or corroboration of allegations.
It’s a total double standard, and it ought to be illegal.
In fact, it just may be.
The Federalist's senior editor Mollie Hemingway led off in suggesting that the decision to kill the Post report by Facebook and Twitter amounted to blatant election interference (remember how Democrats always claim it’s Trump and Republicans who ‘interfere’ with our elections, along with legions of ‘Russian spies’?).
“Holy bleeping bleep. Facebook explicitly admitting it is protecting Biden -- and interfering in the presidential election -- by censoring media outlets and limiting discussion of today's breaking news about Biden's engagement with Burisma,” she wrote last week in response to Stone’s announcement.
https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/1316403712479420418
The Republican National Committee, in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, labeled the censorship an “in-kind” political contribution, which is patently illegal.
Fox News reported exclusively:
The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that the censorship of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged knowledge of those dealings amounts to an “illegal corporate in-kind political contribution” to the Biden campaign, Fox News has learned.
In the complaint, the RNC said it “believes that Twitter has violated FECA and the Commission’s Regulations by making corporate in-kind contributions to Biden for President.”
The party rightly described Twitter as “a partisan actor, run by partisan Democrats” and has accused the platform of “using its corporate resources to provide active support for Joe Biden’s campaign in violation of federal law.”
The party demanded the FEC “conduct an immediate investigation” into Twitter’s “illegal in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign,” and “impose the maximum penalty allowed under the law.”
Because here’s the thing: If our federal agencies responsible for ensuring social media platforms operate within the confines of the law refuse to do their jobs, then guess what? Those platforms will go on violating laws with impunity — and on behalf of the Marxist left.
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