US President Donald Trump on Wednesday rebuked Facebook and Twitter for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by former US vice president Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine.
The newspaper said it had obtained a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in his Ukraine business affairs.
The Democratic nominee for the Nov. 3 presidential election has repeatedly denied any such involvement.
“Smoking-gun e-mail reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” the newspaper’s headline read.
As Joe Biden’s campaign denied he had ever met the businessman, Facebook and Twitter placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions over its veracity.
“This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said.
Twitter said it was limiting the article’s dissemination due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article.
Republicans were outraged by what they called partisan censorship.
Trump, who trails Joe Biden in polls ahead of the election, blasted the two social media giants.
“So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of ‘Smoking Gun’ emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost,” Trump posted on Twitter.
“It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician,” he wrote.
At a rally later in Iowa, Trump said the Twitter account of his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was blocked after she shared the Post story.
“Because she is reporting the truth! They close down her account,” Trump said.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey expressed regret over how Twitter communicated what it was doing with the article.
“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable,” he said in a tweet.
The New York Post said the computer had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April last year.
The unidentified shop owner told the newspaper that after the computer seemed to have been forgotten, he copied the hard drive and gave the machine to federal authorities.
The shop owner passed the hard drive copy to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who provided it to the newspaper.
While Joe Biden’s campaign did not deny the existence of the computer or validity of the e-mails on it, Giuliani has a record of dispersing disinformation about both Bidens and Ukraine.
Last month, the US Treasury said one “source” Giuliani met with several times, Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach, “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade.”
The Post criticized Facebook and Twitter for helping Joe Biden’s campaign, saying that no one has disputed the story’s veracity.
“Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines,” it wrote in an editorial.
The story revived criticisms from the past two years that Joe Biden, when he was in charge of the administration of then-US president Barack Obama’s Ukraine policy, took actions to help his son and the Ukrainian energy company whose board Hunter Biden sat on, Burisma.
He has repeatedly rejected such allegations.
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said flatly in September last year.
The story focused on one e-mail from April 2015, in which a Burisma board adviser named Vadym Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father, but there was no indication when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened.
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