Internal data from the Biden campaign shows that bombshell stories relating to a laptop apparently owned by Hunter Biden made more noise online than the massive Hillary Clinton email scandal of 2016. However, Team Biden was spared scrutiny from the mainstream media, seemingly boosting him in the 2020 presidential election.
“According to Biden campaign metrics, online chatter about the Hunter Biden story during the election’s last week was greater than it was around Hillary’s emails during last month of ’16,” the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein reported Monday. “The difference: it never spilled over into mainstream outlets.”
According to Biden campaign metrics, online chatter about the Hunter Biden story during the election’s last week was greater than it was around Hillary’s emails during last month of ’16. The difference: it never spilled over into mainstream outlets. https://t.co/6zYPVfo0K8
— Sam Stein (@samstein) November 16, 2020
It was revealed in October by the New York Post that emails and messages allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop uncovered an apparent influence peddling scheme within the Biden family.
However, the potentially damaging story to Democratic nominee Joe Biden was quickly censored by both Facebook, where reach was limited, and Twitter, where users were barred from sharing or even direct messaging the report and the Post had their account suspended. Twitter claimed they blocked the report over the materials being “hacked,” though there still is no evidence to support such a claim.
Still, despite (or because of) the Big Tech censorship, the reports spread online, eclipsing Clinton-related email chatter in 2016, the Daily Beast reported.
In other words, the story was seemingly gripping the American people.
And when Big Tech censorship seemed to fail in protecting Biden, the mainstream media stepped in to do their part: they stayed silent.
“Fearing a redux of that disastrous end-of-the-campaign implosion, the team dove further into the research,” the Daily Beast reported. “What they found there was more assuring. While the Hunter Biden story had taken off on Facebook, YouTube, and various right-wing sites, it had not crossed over into mainstream outlets.”
According to the news outlet, the Biden campaign says their internal polling “showed that voters largely weren’t persuaded by it,” though the high-volume chatter online seems to suggest otherwise.
The Democrat Party, according to the report, believes “Democrats are still losing the war online,” when in reality, the social media landscape benefits the Left.
“As part of an ongoing campaign to pressure Facebook into censoring content that threatens their control of the flow of information, left-leaning media outlets have repeatedly sounded the alarm over conservative sites and voices supposedly having a ‘massive advantage‘ on Facebook,” Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley outlined in October. “The self-serving claim reverberates throughout the media echo chamber despite clear evidence to the contrary. That evidence reveals the opposite is true: Left-leaning outlets enjoy more total engagements collectively, dwarf conservative sites in followers and dominate newsfeeds.”
“Right-leaning sites account for a little less than half (47.9%) of engagements produced by Facebook’s top 25 outlets,” Bickley highlighted, adding: “That a few sites, like ours (The Daily Wire), do quite well in engagement is actually the product of conservative users being funneled to a smaller number of sites because of the overwhelming dominance of left-leaning outlets. Among the top 25 publishers that frequently appear on NewsWhip’s reports, only about a third (36%) are right-leaning.”