After censoring a New York Post story claiming to expose Hunter and Joe Biden in scandal, Twitter and Facebook have received much opposition, with Senator Josh Hawley and others calling for the FEC to investigate Facebook and Twitter for violating campaign finance law.
This call to action came after Facebook announced that they would be "reducing [the article's] distribution on our platform" until it was sufficiently "fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners."
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.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Twitter additionally announced that they had censored the article under the pretense that it had violated their "Hacked materials Policy", allegedly locking the New York Post's account as well as blocking the sharing of links and even trying to prevent the spread of pictures of the article. As a twitter spokesperson told National Review:
In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter.
In response to this censorship, several politicians have demanded answers from Facebook and Twitter. Among those Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
Sen. Cruz, criticized this censorship on the grounds that the move was hypocritical, with Twitter allowing "users to share less well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates for public office." Cruz claims that this move "can only be seen as an obvious and transparent by Twitter to influence the upcoming presidential election."
Josh Hawley has responded to this incident in a similar way, saying that this "intervention suggests partiality on the part of Facebook," and questioned Twitter's integrity.
On Wednesday's "The Ingraham Angle," Hawley additionally accused Big Tech of attempting to "control the news." Hawley said he will be "inviting Facebook and Twitter to come testify under oath to [his] subcommittee in the United States Senate," stating that both companies have potential violations of election law.
"This thing just stinks, it reeks - this is going to pull the lid off, I think, on just the corruption surrounding Big Tech," he said.
Hawley, has additionally written a letter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) calling for the Commission to investigate Facebook and Twitter for potentially violating campaign finance law through an "active suppression of public speech."
Hawley writes:
There can be no serious doubt that the Biden campaign derives extraordinary value from depriving voters access to information that, if true, would link the former Vice President to corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.
H/T New York Post