By MAKENNA MCCORVEY
Staff Writer and Editor
Social media has shifted in the past couple of months from a platform to share your weekend photos into somewhere you go to get all of the latest news and controvercies. And with all modern news we face partisan or biased journalism. But, what happens when only one side of a story is allowed to be told? Well ,America is about to find out.
Twitter has recently been caught censoring more than usual on a particular topic. And this topic is the Biden family. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is being called out for a variety of fishy information pertaining to his son Hunter Biden. On October 14,2020 NewYork Post published an article titled “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”. It did not take long for this article to blow up and circulate the internist, including Twitter. The article in summary releases an email sent by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma to Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden thanking him for the opportunity to meet his father (Joe Biden). This unheard of meeting sparks controversy because according to the New York Post article, “Less than eight months after Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for the introduction to his dad, the then-vice president admittedly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into getting rid of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.” (Morris, Fonrouge 2020) This information violated Twitter’s “Hacked Materials Policy”, which protects people from getting personal information leaked on Twitter. So, they censored it and made the link to the controversial article from New York Post unavailable on the platform.They decided It did not end there, Twitter temporarily blocked the accounts of the Trump campaign, Kayleigh McEnany’s (Whitehouse Press Secretary), and New York Post. This is not the first time Twitter has been called out for being biased and over censoring posts. During the 2016 election when President Trump was up for office against former First Lady Hillary Clinton, when there was some disturbing information leaked involving the Clinton administration. Which had to do with potential false information and hacked information. The issue at hand is not that people don’t want to be protected from hacker leaking information, it’s about who is being protected by these policies. On numerous occasions the media has falsely accused republicans, especially President Trump and uses unverified personal information. But, Twitter somehow never catches it. There seems to be a bias on what stories are allowed to be told, and America is sick of it. And now, according to The Wall Street Journal, “The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to issue a subpoena on Tuesday to Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey after the social-media company blocked a pair of New York Post articles that made new allegations about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which his campaign has denied”(Hughes2020). Will this be the last Twitter scandal? What will censoring policies for Silicon Valley look like from here on out? America has yet to know.
References:
Morris,Fonrouge (2020) “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad” [Online] New York PostHughes (2020) “Senate to Subpoena Twitter CEO Over Blocking of Disputed Biden Articles”[Online] Wall Street Journal