![]() Trump allies have claimed that when Vice President Biden pushed to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor later that year, his goal was to stop a probe into Burisma. Biden, a highly paid Burisma board member, for the opportunity to meet his father, who was then vice president. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on,” said White House spokesman Ian Sims.Īmong the emails featured in the initial New York Post story was one from April 2015 in which a Ukrainian executive at the Burisma energy firm thanked the younger Mr. In a statement, the White House dismissed today’s hearing as “a bizarre political stunt,” describing it as the latest effort by “extreme MAGA members” to “re-litigate the outcome of the 2020 election.” “The basic job of trust and safety is to strike this balance between the harms of restricting free speech and the dangers of not getting it right.” “Bizarre political stunt” “ Someone will have to make choices about the governance of online spaces,” Yoel Roth, the former global head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, told the committee. Yet no one, including the companies themselves, seems to have an easy answer. Other issues raised by lawmakers in the hearing were (by Republicans) Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation policies, which suppressed tweets from Harvard- and Stanford-educated doctors, and (by Democrats) the company’s willingness to bend policies under pressure from then-President Donald Trump and its failure to rein in violent rhetoric from him and his supporters, including ahead of the Jan. The hearings underscored the huge social dilemma of whether and how to moderate information being disseminated online – not only in foreign disinformation campaigns, which remain an ongoing threat, but a host of other scenarios. “It’s important that those concerns – of free speech and the dangers of disinformation leading to offline violence – are weighed carefully and discussed openly.” “Actors from both sides of the political spectrum see the threat of disinformation differently,” says Anthony DeAngelo, a former congressional staffer and now head of public affairs for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, whose work includes tackling polarization and disinformation. Those on the left see the right as unconcerned about the real-world harms disinformation can cause – including from foreign sources such as Russia, whose 2016 election interference was well documented in a bipartisan Senate report, or from domestic extremists, such as those behind the Jan. Many on the right believe the left and their allies at social media companies have used the label to suppress or discredit inconvenient or politically damaging information, constricting legitimate free speech in the public arena. The Hunter Biden laptop controversy offers a window into a much broader disagreement over how the government, Big Tech, and the media define and address “disinformation,” a topic that has become highly polarized. Oversight Committee Chair James Comer brought in three former Twitter executives in a bid to establish accountability for what Republicans have characterized as an unfair collusion of government, Big Tech, and media to sway the election. At the time, the emails were widely dismissed as likely Russian disinformation, but forensic analyses commissioned by media outlets later indicated they were authentic. No other media outlets appear to have had access to the material at the time, and the Post was not able to get the FBI or Hunter Biden’s lawyer to confirm whether the laptop belonged to him. The cache included indecent images and videos of the younger Mr. The Post said that Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had given them the copied data, which was reportedly recovered by a computer repair shop in Delaware after the owner failed to pick it up. ![]() 14, 2020, story suggested that the Biden family had inappropriately used its influence for financial gain, citing emails the paper said it obtained from a copy of a hard drive that had belonged to Hunter Biden, the president’s son. House Republicans used their new majority today to launch long-promised hearings into the Biden family’s business dealings, kicking off with a probe into why Twitter suppressed a New York Post story that was unflattering to Joe Biden just three weeks before the presidential election.
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