Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” spoke with the podcast “Fox News Rundown” on Friday about reports of Facebook and Twitter restricting their users from sharing a series of New York Post articles discussing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.
Chris Wallace stated that censorship of the stories by the big tech platforms reminds him of Big Brother, a reference to George Orwell’s book 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 discovered on the laptop indicated that Hunter Biden had introduced an executive from the Ukrainian energy firm which he was on the board of, Burisma Holdings, to his father Joe Biden, who was the vice president of the United States at the time. Joe Biden has repeatedly denied that he has ever discussed his son’s overseas business dealings with him, and the Biden campaign has denied 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 announced that Facebook would be “reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Twitter followed Facebook’s lead, and began blocking users from sharing the Post story, citing a violation of the platform’s “Hacked Materials Policy.”
On Friday, Chris 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 also 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,” he 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,” Wallace added.