On Friday, Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” spoke with the “Fox News Rundown” podcast about reports of Facebook and Twitter restricting users from sharing a series of New York Post articles with new information about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.
Chris Wallace said that censorship of the stories by the big tech platforms reminds him of Big Brother, a reference to George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984.
“I’ve got a real problem with that. I think you’re either in or you’re out. And when I say that, either it’s the Wild West and you post everything — and I can understand the concern about that after what happened in 2016 with Russian disinformation — or you put everything out there and if you have a problem with some of it … then put a word on there to your users and say, ‘We can’t confirm this story’ or ‘There’s some questions with this story.’ But to just ban it and to say, ‘Nobody is allowed to discuss this story or post this story’ — which, you know, is out there and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, it was the front page of the New York Post — really strikes me as smacking of Big Brother,” Wallace said.
On Wednesday, the New York Post reported that it had obtained emails from a laptop that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden. The laptop was allegedly abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware.
One of the many emails recovered from the laptop indicated that Hunter Biden had introduced an executive from Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm that he was on the board of, to his father Joe Biden, who was the vice president of the United States at the time. Joe Biden has denied on multiple occasions that he had ever discussed Hunter’s overseas business dealings with him, and the Biden campaign has denied that any formal meeting with the executive took place.
Immediately after the first New York Post article was published, Facebook Policy Communications Director and former Democratic congressional staffer Andy Stone reported that Facebook would be “reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Twitter followed Facebook’s example, and blocking its users from sharing the New York Post story, citing a violation of its “Hacked Materials Policy.”
On Friday, Wallace said the actions of these big tech platforms had “backfired because… it has created not just a story about the story, but a story about how big [social] media giants are.”
The Fox News host went on to describe the Post report as “very sketchy.”
“Not saying it’s not true, but it seems to me it needs a lot of investigation. The guy who ran the computer store is supposedly legally blind, he’s not sure who even came in with the computers. He says that, although the story keeps changing, that he gave it to the FBI last December. But, you know, they’re not confirming that,” Wallace continued.
“Now, he’s saying that he gave it to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer. Rudy Giuliani is not the most independent source on all this stuff. So I think it’s absolutely worth investigating, but I’m not sure I’d even go with it at this point,” he added.