KUALA LUMPUR – With election day in the US presidential election less than a month away, Facebook and Twitter are taking proactive steps to limit the spread of what they consider misinformation.
The latest, dramatic example involves a New York Post story regarding the past business dealings of Hunter Biden – the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden – in Ukraine.
In the article, President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani claimed to have obtained and leaked a trove of private materials from Hunter Biden.
The leaked documents suggested at one point Hunter gave a Ukrainian executive the “opportunity” to meet the former vice president. The Biden campaign said his schedule indicated no such meeting took place.
Facebook curtailed the spread of the Post’s article, as well as sent the story to independent fact-checkers. Twitter allowed the story to spread before labelling the link as “potentially unsafe”. They also blocked the accounts of several right-leaning individuals, including US President Trump’s press secretary.
Conservative groups, as well as the president himself decried these actions as censorship and evidence of Silicon Valley’s liberal bias.
“Joe Biden’s Silicon Valley pals are aggressively blocking negative news stories about their guy and preventing voters from accessing important information. This is like something from communist China or Cuba, not the United States of America,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.
Facebook, Twitter and Google are taking these actions after being accused by many groups, especially Democrats, of allowing the propagation of unverified and hacked information during the 2016 presidential elections.
The leaking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email by Wikileaks during the last months of the last election is pointed to as a pivotal moment in an ultimately tight political contest.
There have already been cases of misinformation being spread on social media during the current election cycle, on topics such as Joe Biden’s health, the wildfires in California and mail-in voter fraud. – The Vibes, October 16, 2020
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