Author and Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi said Thursday that decisions by social media platforms to slow the spread of a recent New York Post article on the business dealings of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, helps fuel arguments from conservatives that the platforms engage in “selective censorship.”
Following the publishing of the Post article, which alleged that Hunter Biden helped broker a meeting between an executive at the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings and his father when Joe Biden was vice president, Facebook announced that it was slowing the article’s spread, while Twitter started blocking the story as “potentially unsafe.”
“The sudden decision by all of these platforms to start establishing standards about questions like hacked material, leaked material, doxing material, material that can’t be verified, that’s very convenient because the last four years, the news landscape has been just packed full of what they call hack and leak stories,” Taibbi argued on Hill.TV’s “Rising” Thursday.
Taibbi cited the Steele dossier, which included allegations of links between the Trump campaign and Russian actors ahead of the 2016 election, as one example of a report that became an important topic of discussion among social media platforms and news outlets, despite containing unverified claims.
Taibbi argued that the Post article, which used information from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that had allegedly been obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, should receive the same treatment.
“In journalism, we don’t have an admissibility requirement,” Taibbi explained. “If something comes in and we don’t know the exact providence of it, that doesn’t mean we can’t publish it. All we have to do is establish that it’s true, and a lot of important stories have been broken that way.”
Watch Taibbi’s interview above.
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