Facebook and Twitter restricts New York Time Post story

On Facebook, Twitter and its own website, a group called PeaceData claimed to be a global news organization with a mission to expose corruption. Its supposed purpose was to tell stories that had been hidden from the public.

Turns out PeaceData was concealing the truth about its own story. In September, Facebook and Twitter said they had uncovered ties between PeaceData and the Internet Research Agency, the notorious Russian troll farm that sought to sow discord among Americans during the 2016 US elections. The social networks quickly pulled the group's accounts, some of which appeared to use artificial intelligence to generate fake profile pictures.

Yesterday, the New York Post published an article based on what it alleged were emails and photos obtained from Hunter Biden’s personal laptop. The story (and a later follow-up article) focused on Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which have formed the basis for several earlier political attacks on Joe Biden during his presidential campaign. Reporters outside the Post disputed its allegations and its trustworthiness. Then, social media companies stepped in.

Facebook reduced the reach of the Post’s story the morning it was published, saying that it was eligible for fact-checking by the platform’s partners. Twitter went further and banned linking to the story at all, citing a policy against posting hacked information. While both sites have introduced stricter moderation rules in recent months — each banned Holocaust denial posts earlier this week, for instance — it was an unusual crackdown on an investigative story from a well-known print publication. And quickly, the sites’ decisions became the story.

This is a complicated saga, and almost nobody involved comes out looking good. But it illustrates some very obvious problems with political discourse, social media, and how information works on the internet.

Facebook and Twitter have a troubling amount of power over online speech. Both platforms could logically ban huge swaths of influential, highly respected investigative journalism under their policies. It’s unclear how Facebook fact-checkers are supposed to verify a story based on private documents obtained by a single news outlet, and “hacked” documents from sources like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden formed the basis for award-winning stories at illustrious publications.

Twitter and Facebook have the First Amendment on their side. Social media platforms almost certainly have the legal right to ban this story — or even the entirety of the New York Post. And it’s not because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a perpetual tech policy punching bag for Republicans and Democrats alike. The First Amendment generally protects websites’ right to avoid hosting speech they don’t like, barring special cases, like an antitrust allegation, that don’t make much sense here. (Senator Josh Hawley has argued that banning an anti-Biden story counts as election interference, but that’s quite a stretch.) Anyone who claims this is clearly unlawful behavior, or that the only legal defense is Section 230, is either mistaken or lying.

When everything else feels like it’s breaking down, it’s not surprising that people want Facebook or Twitter to intervene with their clear, unilateral power. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them the right tool for the job.