Facebook Had the Chance to Stop Biden Ukraine Misinformation Before But Opted Not To

The company says it will stem the spread of smears it once took money to promote.

Hunter Biden speaks at 2016 event in Washington, D.C.Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Wednesday, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted that the company would be “reducing [the] distribution” of a set of New York Post stories purporting to unearth new details about Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian company.

The stories focused on Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company, and suggest that his father, Joe Biden, worked in his time as vice president to get Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who had targeted the firm, fired because of his son’s role.

There are a number of misleading framings, contorted contexts, and odd details that have caused most reporters to treat the New York Post stories with suspicion.

The reporting is based on unconfirmed details originating from files purportedly found on a laptop taken into a Delaware computer repair shop but never picked up. Thomas Rid, a political science professor who specializes in information technology amid conflicts, has suggested the laptop and its contents could be part of an intentional disinformation campaign. While it is possible that the laptop or the emails on it are real, the Post has not reported on where the laptop came from, nor has it verified other details contained in the emails it says were found on the computer’s hard drive. 

The stories are framed in misleading ways. One has a headline claiming Joe Biden met with a Burisma executive, while the story merely quotes an email discussing an “opportunity” to meet. (Biden’s camp says no meeting took place.) The story misrepresents the relevant timeline of events and elides key details.

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.

While Biden did push for Shokin to be fired, he did so in conjunction with independent international pressure—Shokin was seen as soft on corruption by the broader diplomatic community. And by the time that coalition won Shokin’s ouster, his investigation of Burisma had been dormant for years. 

The notion that Biden sought the prosecutor’s firing to protect the company is contradicted by all available evidence but remains central to the narrative that prominent conservatives, including President Trump, have spun over the last several years about the Bidens’ supposed corruption in Ukraine. Perhaps no one working in media did more to sustain that story than John Solomon, who pushed it in a series of pieces written for The Hill; after an internal review, the publication concluded they “failed to identify important details.”

While Facebook didn’t specify exactly why it chose to take the unusual step of reducing the spread of the Post stories pending further verification by one of its fact-checking partners, its likely it was because of the stories’ shortcomings. 

What’s odd about Facebook’s quick decision is that had a chance to do this before. After Solomon published his stories last year, Trump started buying ads in October of 2019 related to supposed Biden corruption in Ukraine, including flat out falsehoods about how “Joe Biden PROMISED Ukraine $1 BILLION DOLLARS if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.”

At the time a Facebook spokesperson said the ads did not violate their company’s advertising policy because politicians were exempt from its disinformation policy. It’s not clear what prompted Facebook’s quick action today, but, with Biden significantly up in the polls and only three weeks until the end of voting, it’s possible that Facebook is preparing for a Biden win after years of working to enable Trump’s misinformation efforts. 

There’s also reason to doubt the effectiveness of Facebook’s actions on Wednesday. Despite their promise to reduce distribution of the stories, metrics from Crowdtangle, a social media analytics site owned by Facebook, show that the stories has been shared more than 100,000 times on the platform as of Wednesday afternoon, by accounts with over 47 million collective followers.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate