CNN’s in-house Biden spokesman Jake Tapper had a dyspeptic episode over pesky GOPers who claim Big Tech “rigged” the 2020 election by censoring one of the most important stories in recent years.
The CNN anchor piggybacked on a so-called Washington Post “exclusive” in a ridiculous attempt to cast Big Tech platforms like Twitter that censored the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as having a negligible effect on the 2020 election. As if questioning is somehow a bad thing, he whined on the Oct. 7 edition of CNN’s The Lead how GOP “questioners” ripping Big Tech for censoring the New York Post story on the Biden scandal were “more cynical players than the [election] deniers.”
Tapper should probably read NewsBusters more. A 2020 MRC poll found that 45 percent of President Joe Biden’s voters weren’t fully aware of the New York Post story precisely because the media and Big Tech whitewashed it. Had Americans been fully aware of the scandal, 9.4 percent of Biden voters would have abandoned him, flipping all six of the swing states he won to former President Donald Trump, giving Trump a victorious 311 electoral votes.
But Tapper buried his head and acted like Big Tech’s internet speech policing was no big deal. He noted that The Washington Post analyzed two groups of Republicans, “One is people who just lie about the election or they're wrong and deluded and just say it was stolen or whatever.” Then Tapper let loose on the Big Tech critics:
And then there’s the ‘questioners. And these ‘questioners,’ these Republican questioners, to me, a lot of them are people who know better but are afraid that if they don’t at least come out with ‘oh, it was rigged in a different way, because Twitter wouldn’t let the New York Post publish, you know, publicize the Hunter Biden story' or whatever- but they go along with it in a way that makes them feel comfortable, but they're still playing along with the lie. I almost find them more cynical than the deniers.
Maybe Tapper didn’t get the memo when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the quiet part out loud to podcaster Joe Rogan in August that his platform censored the Hunter Biden story only after receiving FBI pressure. According to an October 2020 analysis done by Newsweek, the suppression worked. The New York Post’s story only reached roughly half the audience that other viral news stories reached on Facebook. Anti-Trump stories like The New York Times story on Trump’s taxes reached roughly 5.37 million people, while the Post story only reached about 1.94 million.
An MRC Free Speech America study of CensorTrack’s database between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022, uncovered 646 instances of Big Tech platforms censoring criticism of Joe Biden. This included 140 instances involving users — encompassing lawmakers, organizations, news outlets and media personalities — censored for sharing anything related to the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
