The President of the United States has a 52-year-old son who has been in scandals, and he has a history suspicious millionaire In Ukraine and China, he is now being investigated by the Prosecutor General’s Office, and after the death of his brother in 2015, he descended into a hell of drug addiction and self-destructive behavior of which abundant photographic evidence is spread on social networks.
Obviously, under normal circumstances, the mere presence of Hunter Biden’s past would be a burden to his father, a constant concern in the White House, as was Jimmy Carter’s brother’s business in Libya once, or Bill Clinton’s half-brother gang connections. However, the Hunter Biden scandals have been carefully buried by the press and social media, both in the US and abroad.
This is a side effect of a massive Russian disinformation campaign, which rocked the political system in the 2016 election, causing the kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that allowed something resembling accuracy to flourish. self-monitoring system. This self-censorship was accepted last week by a group of executives from digital companies who testified on Capitol Hill at the request of Republicans.
News bomb
“We made a mistake,” Yoel Roth, who during the 2020 presidential campaign oversaw Twitter’s content filtering policy, contritely admitted at his oral hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “It was foolish to dismiss the possibility of Russia returning to its old ways,” he added.
Roth was referring to an exclusive post about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine that was invalidated by Facebook and Twitter three weeks before the last presidential election. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published a surprising, obtained revelation about the then-Democratic candidate’s son’s business. of emails From a laptop abandoned at a tech service in Delaware in 2019. The contacts discussed multimillion-dollar businesses, with exorbitant transfers, in Ukraine and China, and information from the “Mail” suggests that the Biden son has capitalized on the family name to prosper and get rich . The front page of the tabloid chanted, “Biden’s secret emails.”
It was, from the book, what in Washington political jargon is commonly called the “October Surprise,” a scandalous exclusive weeks before the presidential election, which is always the first Tuesday in November, and usually turns upside down in the polls. It can even decide elections, although this is not always the case. For example, when a lawyer revealed in 2000 to a Time magazine journalist that George W. Bush had been arrested years earlier for drunk driving, or when the AP revealed in 2008 that a Kenyan aunt of Barack Obama lived in the United States. .UU. without the correct immigration papers.
However, Biden’s surprise went unnoticed. The mainstream press, riven by the experience of Hillary Clinton’s famous campaign emails, got her Russian espionage In an act of media misinformation, he made a blank in The Post. And digital platforms, in the same vein, constantly accused of negativity in the face of Moscow’s interference in the 2016 crackdown, proceeded to censor links to that news.
Earlier, the FBI and CIA had warned them of a possible new Russian disinformation campaign. The fact is that even if the emails on the laptop are true, they emerged amid a wealth of genuine misinformation, and Republican attempts to show that it was Joe Biden himself who actually profited from business in Ukraine and China through his familiar, baseless assertion.
When, on the eve of the election, a Twitter profile tried to share information from the “post,” a message explained why that wasn’t possible: “The link has been determined by Twitter or our partners as potentially malicious.” Asked by ABC at the time, the company explained in an email that since 2018 it has adopted a policy “prohibiting the use of the service for distribution”. Content obtained without permission’, ignoring that with this rule, the most important revelations of the journalist would never have come to light. Requests for further explanations remained unanswered.
Even if the laptop emails were true, they stemmed from a wealth of factual misinformation.
At the White House, Donald Trump demanded the alleged scandals of the Biden family’s business in Ukraine finally come to light, which earned him his first political impeachment of 2020 for putting pressure on the president. This country in a phone call. The then-president had falsely denounced technology and media censorship so many times that when it did come, practically no one paid any attention to it.
It was the fall of the pandemic and the election, with the hangovers of racial protest and the recent memory of riots and looting. The Post was, after all, Trump’s tabloid, owned by tycoon Rupert Murdoch, a friend of Trump. Joe Biden kept his distance in the polls, comfortably prevailed, and even won Conservative strongholds Like Georgia and Arizona. However, he did so at a minimum, and many Republicans still believe that if his son’s actions had been known, the United States might live today under a second Trump term.
“A series of Big Tech autocrats have abused the unlimited power that allowed them to do so suppression of freedom of expression to amplify their political preferences,” said the new chairman of the State Oversight Committee, Republican James Comer, at the oral hearing on Wednesday. The conservatives took control of the House in the November 2022 by-election, and one of their first decisions was to investigate the Biden family businesses and oversight “Many of the Biden family have made a habit of abusing influence at the highest levels of government to enrich themselves, often at the expense of national interests,” Kummer later added.
internal documents
Before the former Twitter managers appeared at the Capitol, the new owner of the social network, Elon Musk, presented journalists Matt Taibi and Barry Weiss with thousands of internal company documents confirming such oversight. Both revealed that the Biden campaign did not ask Twitter to suppress the news, but rather silencing it was the decision of the managers themselves.
In 2022, with Biden already inaugurated in the White House, preoccupied with other issues such as withdrawing from Afghanistan or invading Ukraine, the North American public press is validating Hunter Biden emails. The PC was there, the connections were correct, the contacts took place with shady Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen and brokers, as was reported, already a year and a half later, by the Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and many others.
Few sang “mea culpa” afterwards. Some discordant voices alone scream from their limited positions. Such is the case of conservative Washington Post columnist Mark Theissen, who is also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. According to Thiessen, “It’s true scandal Which appears to involve an illegal agreement between the FBI, intelligence and social media platforms to prevent true news that could have harmed Biden and helped Trump’s re-election campaign.”
Now everything is in the hands of the prosecution. It remains to be seen if prosecutors in Delaware, where Hunter Biden resided and where his computer turned up, believe he should be charged with a crime. And if the media and social networks will give it on this occasion the media value that it enjoys.
