Is Big Tech 'Fixing' The US Election?

There has been a growing concern about the influence of the major US 'Big Tech' companies, including the social media platforms operated by Facebook are Twitter, are having on various aspects of  US society, culture, business and government. However, the emerging problems with the 2020 Presidential election were not widely foreseen.

In essence, there are now questions over the role of the major social media platforms in deciding what the public should and should not know.

Last week The New York Post newspaper published an explosive news piece on the activities of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The investigation, based on leaked emails, revealed the way in which the Democratic Presidential candidate's son may have used his father’s connections to pitch for lucrative contracts with Ukrainian businessmen. It is alleged that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured the government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

Hunter Biden also pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company, including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family,” Since Joe Biden presents himself as the honest candidate in this US election, the fact that his family members may have been enriching themselves through their connections are relevant to the decisions the voters are about to make.

The source of the emails lies and their veracity are a subject of  dispute, however the New York Post is an established and reputable newspaper which will have applied its editorial criteria before deciding to publish the story

After the story was published in The New York Post both Twitter and Facebook made an unprecedented move into overt censorship, with the world’s largest social media companies, deciding to prevent the dissemination of the story. 

It is conceivable that Twitter might rightfully act if there were knowingly false information being disseminated ahead of an election by obscure or unknown actors seeking to affect an election. But it is quite another thing for the social media giant to decide that the re-posting of a story in the New York Post, one of America’s oldest and most venerable papers, founded by Alexander Hamilton, should be cause to suppress the speech of the White House Press Secretary. 

Some commentators are saying that this is not an attempt to prevent interference in an election, it is itself interference in an election.

Interference carried out by Facebook and Twitter, tech giants and monopolies in possession of unprecedented amounts of power. The idea that the Hunter Biden emails are the result of a hack is disputed. But even if the claim were accurate, it surely is not the case that these platforms usually take a strong line against stories based on hacked material. 

UnHerd:      New York Post:      CNBC:      Wall Street Journal:  

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