US Election Article Bar
Facebook and Twitter have been plunged into a new political storm in Washington DC after they blocked the sharing of a negative report about Joe Biden from a major US newspaper.
Republican politicians, right-leaning officials and the family of President Donald Trump demanded further explanation after both companies said on Wednesday night that they were choking off traffic to the story.
That report by the New York Post made fresh allegations about Mr Biden’s official dealings with a Ukrainian energy firm that employed his son Hunter while he was still Vice President, citing emails said to be recovered from an abandoned laptop.
But Facebook said that it had seen "signals" that the story might be false and reduced the story’s prominence in users’ news feeds until it could be examined by independent fact-checkers.
Twitter went further, saying it suspected that the story might be based on "hacked materials" and warning users that the link could be "unsafe" before letting them click through. It also blocked them from sharing the link in private messages.
In doing so, both companies followed existing policies designed to withstand the tide of viral disinformation and digital election meddling that has already flooded the US 2020 election.
Yet the application of those policies to a front-page story by a venerable conservative tabloid, whose owner Rupert Murdoch also controls the influential pro-Trump TV network Fox News, marked a new willingness to intervene in political speech and an escalation of Silicon Valley’s conflict with the American Right.
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
Facebook previously imposed a similar penalty on a New York Post opinion piece in April headlined "Coronavirus may have leaked from a lab" after it was labelled "misleading" by the company’s outside fact-checkers.
A spokesperson for Twitter said: "Given the lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials included in the article, we’re taking action to limit the spread of this information.
"As our hacked materials policy states, we don’t permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking that contains private information or may put people in physical harm or danger."
Meanwhile, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said: “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.”
The article can still be accessed from both social networks, with Twitter users needing to click through a warning screen and Facebook users being able to share it and find it manually.
The message shown by Twitter to users who click on the New York Post's link
Credit: Telegraph/Twitter
The New York Post alleges that Mr Biden met with an official from Burisma while still serving as Vice President, quoting a 2015 email to Hunter Biden from board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi that thanked him for the "opportunity to meet your father". Mr Biden’s campaign denied any such meeting had ever taken place.
Reaction from US conservatives was swift. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri who has long needled tech giants, wrote a letter to Facebook demanding to know whether anyone from the Biden campaign had asked it to take action.
"This news report, clearly relevant to the public interest, has been censored on Facebook… your efforts to suppress the distribution of content revealing potentially unethical activity by a candidate for president raises a number of additional questions."
.@Facebook explain your decision to censor the sourced reporting of the @nypost. Did Biden campaign ask you to do so? pic.twitter.com/FdGQV5N7i3
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 14, 2020
Donald Trump Jr, the President’s eldest son, who has himself been the subject of corruption allegations, said: "This is straight-up election interference by Facebook… Big Tech is openly trying to rig this election for Biden and should be held accountable immediately."
Francis Brennan, director of strategic response for Mr Trump’s campaign, began tweeting out details of the Posts’s story, while Ajit Pai, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, accused Twitter of political bias.
Facebook has an extensive fact-checking programme which scans users’ reactions to articles, refers potentially dubious examples to outside journalists, and then throttles their distribution if they are rated false.
More recently it has begun preemptively suppressing such articles until they can be checked, following years of criticism whenever viral hoaxes spread to millions of people before the company took action.
Republicans better wake up Big Tech is trying to eliminate freedom of speech. https://t.co/wOfhAQvyUW
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 14, 2020
Zuckerberg: “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth”
Facebook: We’re censoring a news story as “misinformation” *before* any “third-party fact checking.” https://t.co/ythskziNcp
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) October 14, 2020
A spokesman for Mr Biden’s campaign said that it had checked Mr Biden’s schedule and that the meeting had never taken place. He pointed to a Republican-led inquiry that concluded in September, finding that Hunter had "cashed in" on his father’s name but that Mr Biden himself had not altered US policy to help him.
Mr Biden’s opponents have long accused Mr Biden of corruption over Burisma, claiming that he pressured the government to fire its chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin in order to kill an investigation of the company.
Mr Biden has always denied that, and US officials have testified that they saw no evidence to suggest it, saying Mr Shokin was fired because he had been failing to investigate corruption. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund had also lobbied for Mr Shokin’s removal for the same reason.
Thomas Rid, an expert on Russian information warfare, urged readers to be cautious of the story, saying that its account of the lost laptop was "exactly how a professional would surface disinformation, and potentially forgeries".
The tech companies’ caution about hacked materials stems from the 2016 election, when Democratic Party emails stolen by Russian agents and shared with mainstream journalists had a substantial effect on the election.
Those emails also helped create the QAnon movement by inspiring Pizzagate, an earlier conspiracy theory that interpreted mundane details of the messages as evidence of a secret child abuse dungeon under a Washington DC pizza restaurant.
In an interview with the Telegraph last year, Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos criticised Jeremy Corbyn for spreading leaked records of Brexit negotiations, calling the Labour leader’s decision "incredibly dangerous" and saying he risked becoming a "useful idiot".
On Wednesday, disinformation researchers mostly welcomed Facebook and Twitter’s decisions, but called or more transparency and consistency about why and how their policies were being enforced.
Baybars Örsek, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which certifies Facebook’s fact-checkers, criticised the "fog" around the "ad hoc" decision and urged the company to say more about how it makes such decisions.
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