On October 14, 2020, just weeks before the November 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published an article exposing damaging content from Hunter Biden’s personal laptop. The Post reported that Biden dropped the laptop off at a local Delaware repair shop in 2019, but never retrieved it.
Through a series of emails obtained from the laptop, Hunter Biden’s corrupt ties with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma were exposed. Additional material extracted from Biden’s laptop included photos of him using hard drugs and sexually explicit content, including a 12 minute sex tape with an unidentified woman.
The morality of publishing the latter is questionable. Hunter Biden has frequently been involved in such sex scandals, even prior to the Post’s reporting on the content of the now infamous laptop. The sexual content exposed by the release of these documents are inherently personal, and hold no real relevance to his father’s political career. But publishing the images of Biden’s crack use is slightly more complicated; it highlights the hypocrisy of his father’s history of supporting drug war efforts and tough on crime legislation while continuing to support his son. Nonetheless, drug addiction is a serious mental health issue and should never be weaponized for personal attacks against someone’s character. This of course did not restrain former President Donald Trump from doing so during a September 2020 presidential debate.
While publishing the personal content from Mr. Biden’s laptop is questionable, publishing information relating to business ties between the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, is completely legitimate political discourse.
According to the Post, Hunter Biden was given a position on the Ukrainian energy firm’s board in 2014, with a monthly salary of $50,000. In a May 2014 email recovered from the laptop to Hunter Biden from Vadym Pozharskyi, a reportedly powerful member of Burisma’s board, Pozharskyi asked Biden for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf. In April 2015, another email recovered from the laptop showed Pozharskyi thanking Hunter Biden for setting up a meeting with his father in Washington D.C.
These emails are quite damaging to the Biden family, as Occam’s razor suggests that Hunter Biden was abusing his relationship with his powerful father to receive $50,000 a month from a foreign company.
All things considered, though, this unethical connection pales in comparison to many other American politicians’ corruption. A notable example of more serious corruption, unsurprisingly, is former president Trump’s business ties with the Gulf States and Israel. The real story here is not Hunter Biden’s business ties with Burisma, but how social media companies like Twitter and Facebook censored the story prior to the 2020 election.
Quickly after the New York Post’s scandalous article was published, Twitter and Facebook censored the story, citing questions about the “origins of the materials” and “misinformation.” This was the first time that Twitter directly suppressed an article from a major news outlet.
As expected, conservatives were outraged. They accused Twitter and Facebook of election engineering in Joe Biden’s favor. The streisand effect occurred and the story spread despite Facebook and Twitter suppression. Other mainstream “liberal” news sources published stories dismissing the laptop and its files as “Russian disinformation.”
In hindsight, these conservative complaints were well founded. A year and a half later, it is now commonly accepted that the laptop is authentic. On March 16, 2022, the New York Times published an article about the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. The article states that the cache of emails “appear” to have been obtained by “a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.” This gave the greenlight for The Washington Post and other mainstream “liberal” outlets to publish similar pieces.
Thus, Twitter and Facebook handed the American right a huge political victory.
American conservatives have loved acting as victims. They have claimed they are the sole victims of “cancel culture,” forgetting or ignoring the story of Colin Kaepernick. Whether it’s critical race theory in schools, LGBT issues, and most of all, internet censorship, conservatives are extraordinarily quick to claim victimhood. Twitter and Facebook, with Hunter Biden’s laptop, fed right into this narrative.
While we will never know the true decision-making process as to why Big Tech curbed the story, right-wingers can latch onto this censorship as evidence of a powerful conspiracy to alter election results and remove right-wing media from the internet.
It is important to note that Twitter and Facebook are private companies, and are not legally bound by the First Amendment. They were well within their legal rights to censor the Post’s article. That said, Twitter and Facebook are now effectively the public square and center of political and cultural speech; removal from such platforms is now virtually equivalent to losing one’s freedom of speech. This gives Twitter and Facebook a moral responsibility, if not legal, to allow free discourse on their platforms.
Twitter and Facebook blundered in a dangerous way by censoring the Hunter Biden story. Hunter Biden is the corrupt son of a powerful Washington politician, who used his power to benefit himself and a foreign energy company. This is an inherently relevant fact while his father was running for president. Twitter and Facebook should never have censored the story and “liberal” media should never have baselessly smeared it as “Russian propaganda.”
The saga of Hunter Biden will be used by conservatives forever to prove victimhood. Big Tech should nonetheless adjust their censorship policies for moral reasons. No private corporation has the authoritative recognition to be the bearer of all truth. Social media companies have a moral responsibility to allow all opinions and sources of information, absent court approved criminal activity. When social media companies stray from this key principle, they run into potentially dangerous situations such as with Hunter Biden’s laptop. Social media companies should never censor legitimate political discourse, as they will credibly be accused of election interference and will fuel the victim complex of conservatives.
