And how shall they hear without a preacher?
– Romans 10:14
“Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” That was the explosive headline from last Wednesday in the New York Post announcing a Wikileaks-like disclosure of sensitive emails from a computer belonging to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
The Post published two more stories related to the first. You can read them here and here.
If true, and it is the opinion of this author that the emails are genuine, the revelations in these stories ought to be enough to force Joe Biden’s resignation as Democratic presidential candidate. Not that this will happen. It almost certainly will not. But in any nation where a Christian view of right and wrong holds, using one’s official position to enrich oneself at the expense of the nation one is supposedly serving is not only a sin, but a crime.
Public officials on the take is one of the chief characteristics of corrupt nations. Speaking of the degeneracy of Judah in his day, the prophet Isaiah wrote of the nation’s political leadership, “Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards” (Isa. 1:23). In times past, Isaiah tells us, Jerusalem, “was full of justice.” But now it was corrupt. It had become a sort of banana republic.
Much more could be said on the topic of corruption, both of Joe and Hunter Biden and of government In the United States more generally, but that is not the main focus of this post, so I will leave it at that.
Getting a bit closer to our main topic, receiving almost as much attention last week as the Hunter Biden stories themselves was the blatant censorship of them by the major social media companies. For example, the main Twitter account of the New York Post (NYP), the newspaper that broke the stories, was locked, as was the account of President Trump’s press secretary and that of the Trump campaign itself, all because they shared links to the first of the stories released on Wednesday, October 14.
Facebook likewise made it difficult to share the link on its platform. Andy Stone, a former Democratic political operative and current Facebook employee, tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to 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.”
So, we have a former Democratic operative working to reduce the distribution of a story unfavorable to Joe Biden on Facebook. No election interference to see here!
Of course, Twitter’s and Facebook’s quick actions to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden story should surprise exactly no one, given the blatant attacks on free speech from the social media companies in recent years.
Although censorship in various forms had been going on for some time previously, it was in August 2018 that the social media giants really raised their game. Most notably with the banning of Alex Jones from all the major social media platforms in the course of one or two days early that month.
Since that time, the purges have not ceased. Just last week there was another wave of purges from YouTube, with several established and large channels being removed as if they never had existed.
As with the recent revelations about Hunter Biden and how he leveraged his connection to his highly placed father to enrich himself, much more can be said about the censorship problem on the social media platforms. But as this also is not the main focus of this post, I likewise will pass over commenting further on this matter for now.
As the title of this post suggests, the main focus of this post, and likely the next few posts, will be on making the Christian, Biblical case for free speech.
Lux Lucet 
These social media folks wouldn’t have their on-line sites if it wasn’t for the 1st Amendment; then they consciously suppress free speech. Recently, more and more web sites/pages are turning up Error 404. Pages that once displayed Luther and other Reformers are gradually disappearing. Isn’t that interesting in a day and age where more and more social media gurus are showing their bias toward Christianity in general.
I am astounded by the level of outright censorship by social media. These are organizations that were granted exemption from liability for content, because they were supposed to act as neutral platforms, not curators of content. But because they do curate content, they ought to have their exemption removed. As you say, many websites are disappearing. Whether the owners are shutting them down for their own reasons or they are being kicked off, I don’t know. One way websites “disappear” is by Google buying them in the search results. I’ve heard many credible stories about websites having their traffic substantially cut, because Google makes them hard to find. That is a form of censorship and one that is disturbing.