Quid pro Joe?
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In Kiev late last month, District Court Judge S. V. Vovk ordered the country’s law enforcement services to formally list the fired prosecutor, Victor Shokin, as the victim of an alleged crime by the former U.S. vice president, according to an official English translation of the ruling obtained by Just the News.
The court had previously ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigations in February to investigate Shokin’s claim that he was fired in spring 2016 under pressure from Biden because he was investigating Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company where Biden’s son Hunter worked.
The court ruled then that there was adequate evidence to investigate Shokin’s claim that Biden’s pressure on then-President Petro Poroshenko, including a threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, amounted to unlawful interference in Shokin’s work as Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.
But when law enforcement agencies opened the probe they refused to name Biden as the alleged perpetrator of the crime, instead listing the potential defendant as an unnamed American.
Vovk ruled that anonymous listing was improper and ordered the law enforcement agencies to formally name Biden as the accused perpetrator...
Biden has admitted on videotape he forced then-Ukraine President Poroshenko to fire Shokin in March 2016 by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. But Biden has steadfastly denied Shokin’s firing was due to the Burisma case. Instead, Biden said, he and other Western leaders believed Shokin was ineffective as a corruption fighter.
Shokin, however, has alleged in a court affidavit he was told he was fired because he refused to stand down his investigation of alleged corruption by Burisma and after he planned to call Hunter Biden as a witness to question him about millions of dollars in payments his American firm received from the Ukraine gas company.
Shokin has also disputed Democrats' claims he was fired because he was incompetent or corrupt, producing among other pieces of evidence a letter from the U.S. State Department in summer 2015 that praised his anti-corruption plan as Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.
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Maybe it wasn't on the official schedule...
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-says-burisma-meeting-not-on-official-schedule/
“Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”
Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton
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I have no idea if this Biden story has legs or not. What does have legs is the fact that Facebook, and now Twitter have banned the story from a newspaper, not a blog, not some rando. A real newspaper.
https://reason.com/2020/10/14/hunter-biden-new-york-post-story-media-facebook-burisma-ukraine/
Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone, a former Democratic staffer, announced that the social media platform would limit the article's distribution pending a fact-checker's review. He directed users to Facebook policy, which states that "in many countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker."
While Facebook is within its rights to take action against content it believes is factually misleading, this seems like a tough standard to enforce evenly. News articles in the mainstream press frequently contain information that is thinly or anonymously sourced, and sometimes proves to be inaccurate. It's one thing for social media platforms to take swift action against viral content that is very obviously false or incendiary, like conspiracy theories about coronavirus miracle cures or voter fraud. It's quite another for the platform to essentially make itself a gatekeeper of legitimate journalism, or a very selective media watchdog that appears to be more concerned about bad reporting when it comes from right-leaning outlets than left-leaning outlets, given the partisan leanings of social media company's internal policy setters.
The obvious result will be a double standard, and an unsustainable one: The right will claim (correctly) that social media companies are biased against questionable conservative content, while the left will claim (also correctly) that plenty of misinformation eludes the moderators. Of course, the oft-proposed solution to the problems with platform content curation is to reform or repeal Section 230, which immunizes online platforms from some lawsuits. This idea is popular with everybody from Trump and Biden to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), even though the obvious result of removing tech platform's liability protection would be even more aggressive moderation. New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari tweeted that Facebook's handling of the Hunter Biden scoop makes the case for modifying Section 230, but without Section 230, Facebook would—for legal reasons—be even more reticent about letting users share unverified claims.
Such an outcome would be bad for a free and open society, for the same reason that it is wrong for the mainstream media to attempt to keep the public wholly ignorant of stories they would rather not tell. The information will get out, and it's better for journalists to contextualize—to add to our understanding—rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
In defending his decision to publish the Steele dossier, which contained unverified, dubious, and speculative information, then-BuzzFeed News Editor in Chief Ben Smith (now a media critic for The New York Times) wrote the following: "You trust us to give you the full story; we trust you to reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality." That's a lesson the entire media should take to heart, and apply evenly, no matter the inconvenience of the narrative.
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Maybe it wasn't on the official schedule...
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-says-burisma-meeting-not-on-official-schedule/
@Jolly said in Quid pro Joe?:
Maybe it wasn't on the official schedule...
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-says-burisma-meeting-not-on-official-schedule/
Ahem....
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Let me reiterate. I have no idea how valid the
general discharged cocaine-addictedHunter Biden story is.The outrage is that our social "media" is censoring this is beyond outrage, particularly when stories about the "Dossier" and other stuff passed their muster.
It's time a reckoning. Are they publishers or platforms?
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Platforms.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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@Jolly said in Quid pro Joe?:
Platforms.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
As Ax and others have said, "If you don't like what Facebook and Twitter are doing, establish your own platform."
It's a nice concept, but these two behemoths are well-established, and everyone uses them. They are de-facto platforms, and they hold absolute censorship power over those who post on those platforms.
In the early 20th century, there were monopolies which controlled communications via copper wires. They controlled access, but not content.
Today, content, what you say, is restricted.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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It's amazing that this story broke so close to the election. They managed to suppress it for so long, and then....wow, amazing.
This, folks, is journalistic integrity at it's finest. Nice going, NYPost!
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