Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on Friday compared Facebook and Twitter to “Big Brother” in their decision to ban The Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals.
Wallace, who moderated the first presidential debate, said the move from the social media giants “backfired” because the narrative became all about them.
“It has created not just a story about the story, but a story about how big [social] media giants are,” he said on the “Fox News Rundown” podcast.
“I’ve got a real problem with that,” Wallace said of both platforms stopping users from sharing The Post’s exposé about Hunter Biden selling access to his then-vice president father, Joe Biden, to executives in Ukraine and China.
“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.'”
Wallace added, “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.”
“Big Brother” is a reference to the fictional character in George Orwell’s novel “1984” about a totalitarian society that’s under constant surveillance.
The Post report included emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, showing an adviser to Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanking him “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Biden’s campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer said the meeting never happened because it wasn’t on the former veep’s schedule.
After the report was published earlier this week, Facebook announced it was “reducing its distribution on our platform,” while Twitter moved to altogether block users who tried to share the article, which it claimed contained “hacked materials.”
Twitter updated its “hacked materials policy” Thursday night, saying it would no longer remove allegedly “hacked” content unless it’s shared by hackers themselves or others. Instead, the platform will label questionable tweets rather than blocking them.