Censoring by Facebook, Twitter Feeds Cynicism in Our Politics
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The campaign to suppress the New York Post’s scoop on how Hunter Biden “merchandized access to his dad” reminds us of a story we were told early in our newspaper career. It might have been apocryphal, but it involved a plutonium-powered satellite that was wobbling in orbit and could crash in Seattle. The government asked the newspapers to hold the story, lest it trigger a panic. The newspapers promptly rushed it into print.
“What would we have done if we’d sat on the story and it did crash in Seattle?” one editor supposedly growled. Lucky for him he didn’t work for Facebook or Twitter, which have been suppressing the Post’s scoop. Twitter has gone so far as to lock the personal twitter account of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh MeEnany, because she linked to the Post’s scoop. She says she’ll have to sever the link in order to get her account back.
It’s one of the damnedest things we’ve ever encountered. We can’t vouch for the emails the Post turned up from a computer Hunter Biden abandoned in a repair shop. One of them quotes an executive of a Ukraine energy combine, Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden was sitting for fifty grand a month, as thanking the Vice President’s son for a chance to meet his dad. The Biden campaign denies the meeting ever happened.
Our instinct is to trust the judgment of the New York Post. It didn’t get to be America’s oldest continuously published newspaper for nothing. It’s been far more forthcoming about the source of the Biden-Biden story than has been, say, the Times in respect of its sources on President Trump’s tax returns. Facebook and Twitter seem to think their own readers are fools. That’s a mistake the Post’s editors would never make.
Is there an editor in America who thinks that Hunter Biden’s consulting in Ukraine was on the up-and-up? Even Hunter Biden himself, while denying ethical wrongdoing, admits he made a mistake of judgment. So the New York Post’s scoop doesn’t land in a vacuum. It emerges amid a widening pattern that is all too clear to traditional newspaper editors. It’s not just Ukraine, either, but also Communist China.
Our own sense is that Americans don’t expect Vice President Biden to attack his own son — or even disavow him. We were on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board when it ran its editorial saying it didn’t expect Jimmy Carter to turn against his scandalous brother Billy (“He ain’t heavy”). Mr. Biden’s best moment in the first debate was when he expressed pride in his son for beating his drug problem.
Americans do, as we sense the story, expect to be able to exercise their own judgment in reckoning what to read about Joe Biden’s business dealings and those of his son. It’s just shocking that Facebook and Twitter are censoring posts from any newspaper, let alone the fourth largest paper in the country. They are feeding the cynicism in our politics. Far better to circulate the Post’s scoop widely and let the chips, like the wobbling satellite, fall where they may.