UPDATED: Facebook and Twitter took action Wednesday to limit distribution of a New York Post story citing emails purportedly revealing evidence of influence-peddling by Joe Biden’s son Hunter — a disputed allegation that has never been corroborated. The paper claimed the emails were supplied by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, after being copied from a laptop that had been abandoned in a computer-repair shop.
According to the Post’s story, Hunter Biden in 2015 introduced his father, then VP in the Obama administration, to a top exec at Ukrainian energy company Burisma after Hunter joined the company’s board. The insinuation is that Hunter successfully influenced his father to pressure Ukraine government officials “into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company,” per the Post.
The Biden campaign said in a statement that, after reviewing the then-VP’s official schedules from the time, no such meeting between Biden and the Ukrainian executive ever took place. The Democratic presidential candidate’s reps reiterated assertions that Biden engaged in no wrongdoing in carrying out U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine.
The emails cited in the Post’s article have not been verified by other news organizations. Two former Biden advisers told Politico they had never heard of the Burisma exec named in the New York Post story, and one of them, Michael Carpenter, called the story “a Russian disinformation operation.”
Facebook on Wednesday identified the Post story as potential misinformation and said it was limiting distribution of the article on its platform. Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director, said in a tweet that the Post story was “eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” and that “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.” Stone later tweeted that the review was “part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.”
Twitter disabled the Post’s original tweets linking to two Hunter Biden stories. In addition, Twitter on Wednesday blocked users from tweeting the Post story, with an error message saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
