Trump slams Twitter, Facebook after clampdown on Hunter Biden article

Twitter has restricted Donald Trump’s re-election campaign’s account from tweeting, prompting the Republican president to slam the social media giant.

After the @TeamTrump posted a video about the president’s Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden’s son, Twitter on Wednesday temporarily blocked the account from sending tweets, citing violation of its rules.

The video was related to a New York Post story that contained alleged details of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company, also saying the former vice president had met with an adviser of the company.

Trump repeatedly pressed Ukraine president to probe Biden’s son: Report

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, a report says.

The Biden campaign, however, told Politico that the Post never asked the campaign about “critical elements of this story,” saying based on a review of the former vice president’s official schedule from that time “no meeting, as alleged by The New York Post, ever took place.”

Facebook also took steps Wednesday to limit the spread of the New York Post story. The company’s policy communications manager Andy Stone tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

On Thursday, Trump accused both companies of wanting to help Biden’s campaign by enforcing policies that restrict users' ability to share the story.

“Now, Big Tech — you see what’s going on with Big Tech? — is censoring these stories to try and get Biden out of this impossible jam. He’s in a big jam,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina.

"He and his family are crooked and they were caught, they got caught," Trump added.

“It’s going to all end up in a big lawsuit and there are things that can happen that are very severe that I’d rather not see happen, but it’s probably going to have to,” Trump said.

The claims made in the New York Post story hinge on emails reportedly retrieved from the hard drive of a laptop dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.

A store owner is said to have provided a copy of the hard drive to an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who now serves as Trump's personal lawyer, before the FBI seized the hard drive.

Following the imposition of the restrictions, the US Senate Judiciary Committee moved to subpoena Tweeter’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.

Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Republican senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley said the committee will vote on sending the subpoena on Tuesday. Senator Hawley also called for sending a subpoena to Facebook.

“We’re going to finally have an accounting that is long overdue,” Graham said. “This to me crystallizes the problem better than anything I could think of.”

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