Hunter Biden's johnson is not your business

I suppose that sometimes, we need a reminder

Always Trumpers breathed new life into the desiccated corpse of Hunter Biden’s laptop after Matt Taibbi, a journalist, released a series of tweets that was supposed to show that the U.S. government pressured social media platforms (particularly Twitter) to quell a controversial New York Post story about the laptop’s contents during the 2020 presidential election.

The thread didn’t show that, not by half, but-who-cares-about-facts, anyway? The torch-and-pitchfork crowd has said all along that the government — the FBI or maybe Joe Biden or perhaps Thomas Jefferson, back from the grave and ready to party — censored the original Post story, which contained some serious allegations about the younger Biden’s business dealings that have not been verified by any other nonpartisan publication.

In fact, it wasn’t the government that decided to hold off spreading the story. AThis was a case of a privately-owned business (Meta, Twitter, Dairy Queen) independently deciding to (briefly) refuse to carry certain content it found questionable. That is not censorship.

But the suspense and the buildup to this nothing burger was weird. Most of this information, we already had: People at Twitter debated internally what to do with the original story out of fear that the content came as the result of hacking — which violated their policies. The Post story was frozen, discussed, and then allowed to be circulated. The Biden campaign team asked some tweets be removed, and those tweets included photos of Hunter Biden in the nude. Did we mention these photos were circulated without Hunter Biden’s approval? Posting such photos violates another one of Twitter’s policies. From The Bulwark, where Tim Miller has been writing the best stuff out there:

In this specific instance, the requests came from a campaign that has absolutely no government authority at all. At the time of the correspondence in question, Joe Biden was a private citizen running for office, while Donald Trump was the president. Taibbi acknowledges that Trump’s White House made requests that “were received and honored” and that “there’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.” So if there are any First Amendment issues at play here—and I don’t believe there are since neither [Elon] Musk nor Taibbi have demonstrated that the government made any mandates on Twitter—they would, in this case, only relate to the material that Trump wanted removed.

Mostly, we have come to look at that laptop as yet another one of those flogging poles, like her eeeemaaaaaails. And, as Miller’s publication says: “No, you do not have a Constitutional right to post Hunter Biden’s dick pic on Twitter” — not to put too fine a point on it.