[Chicks]

Sorry, Repubes. Social media companies aren’t obligated to spread your lies.
By Max Boot

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...ead-your-lies/

What’s the biggest scandal of the week? Is it that: (a) U.S. spy agencies have warned that President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was promoting Russian disinformation to smear Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings in Ukraine? Or is it that: (b) Twitter and Facebook hesitated to act as a conduit for Giuliani’s wild charges? If you’re a partisan Republican, the answer is obviously (b). If you’re a normal, patriotic American, the answer should be (a).

Even if all the emails are true, they don’t establish a scandal. The very first line of the very first New York Post article was false: “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.”

As TheWashington Post has repeatedly reported, the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not investigating Burisma, the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Joe Biden demanded, on behalf of the U.S. government, that Shokin be fired precisely because he was complicit in corruption. Both the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer also deny that the meeting described ever took place. But even in knocking down these lies, the mainstream press gives them visibility — which is what Trump wants.

The right is simply wrong to claim it is the victim of “censorship” by social media companies — and the mainstream press should refrain from using that loaded and inaccurate term. The top nine links on Facebook on Thursday were all from right-wing sources — talk-radio host Dan Bongino, Fox “News,” Trump, Breitbart and Franklin Graham. But Facebook and Twitter are private-sector companies, and they have no obligation to pass along possible Russian disinformation. That’s not “censorship.” It’s editorial judgment, and it’s something we need more of online.