There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the “Biden administration” told Twitter to “censor” the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much:
Of course, in 2020 Donald Trump was in the White House. So either he’s a very confused old man or he’s accusing himself of rigging the election against himself.
Of course, none of this is actually true. As we’ve covered extensively, there remains zero evidence that the Trump White House or even the Biden campaign put pressure on social media to block that story. What did happen was (1) the FBI sent generic warnings to social media to be on the lookout for foreign adversaries conducting hack-and-leak operations to impact the election, but took no stance on the Hunter Biden story, and (2) the Biden administration made a few requests to social media sites solely asking the companies to remove nude selfies that Hunter had on his laptop (i.e., nothing political).
Still, if just a month ago Trump was claiming that any effort to ask Twitter to limit access is proof of an election being “rigged,” you’d have to imagine that he’s furious that [checks notes] his own campaign reached out directly to Elon Musk to get him to remove any link to the hacked-and-leaked internal Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance.
You will recall, of course, that hackers from Iran supposedly social engineered their way into the Trump campaign system and have been trying to get the media to share the docs. They finally found a rando Substacker willing to do so, and then he was quickly banned, as were all links to the document on ExTwitter. As we noted at the time, basically everyone seemed to switch their positions on whether or not this was okay.
Supporters of Elon and Trump insisted that this banning and blocking was absolutely aboveboard and necessary. Supporters of Harris insisted that this was awful, terrible censorship and election interference. Neither seemed willing to recognize that the scenario was effectively identical to four years ago.
Except, it was even more extreme. The NY Times reported late last week that — unlike four years ago — the Trump campaign actually did call Elon to get the content removed.
The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
So, if you’re paying along at home, the Biden campaign did not do anything to get Twitter to block the original story. But to Trumpists, it proves that they “rigged the election” against Trump. Yet here, we now have the same platform, now controlled by someone who has explicitly come out in favor of Donald Trump and revamped the site to basically push pro-Trump material over and over again.
And when a similar situation developed, this time the Trump campaign did reach out to ExTwitter and got them to put in place much more restrictive blocks on the content (old Twitter only blocked one link for 24 hours before reversing course).
Once again, we’re seeing how this works: if Trump does it, it’s perfectly reasonable and no problem. If anyone else is accused of doing it (misleadingly) in favor of a Democrat, it’s treason and election interference.
What a fucked up, stupid situation.
Even worse, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has noted, when JD Vance is asked whether or not Trump won the 2020 election, he is now trying to blame the government “censorship” (that did not happen) of the NY Post story as a retort.
“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” he was asked.
“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” he replied.
This is his parry, the idea that one couldn’t say the 2020 election was fair because there was an effort to censor this determinative story. It is, as we’ve noted in the past, a way for people unwilling to echo Trump’s wilder election-fraud claims to instead point to something less easily falsifiable, this idea that anti-Trump forces put their thumbs on the scales.
But what Vance says here is falsifiable. It is not the case that tech companies censoring a story — specifically, a New York Post story about an email attributed to a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter — cost Trump the election.
This is a seven-layer cake of lies. Vance is lying about almost everything here to paint a totally false picture and to avoid admitting what he knows is true: that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020.