Conservatives blasted Twitter for ignoring and even promoting what they called a misleading revenge-porn attack on Rudy Giuliani after censoring reporting on alleged influence-peddling by Joe Biden's family.
At issue was a picture posted on Twitter on Wednesday showing Giuliani laying back on a bed with his hand reaching inside his pants while a woman stands nearby. The image was taken from the new 'Borat' sequel, in which Giuliani, a personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, believed himself to be doing an interview on the Covid-19 pandemic with a female Russian reporter. After the interview, Giuliani and the woman go to a bedroom at her suggestion.
As it turned out, Giuliani was being pranked and filmed with hidden cameras. The scene in the movie reportedly ends when the Borat character, played by actor Sacha Baron Cohen, runs into the bedroom and says, “She's 15, she's too old for you.”
There's no indication that Giuliani, 76, believed the fictional Russian reporter to be underage. And the former New York mayor said on Wednesday that the scene was a “complete fabrication,” as he was tucking his shirt in after removing a microphone and behaved appropriately with the young woman. He called the police to report the incident at the time it happened, in July.
But the scene was portrayed as scandalous by media outlets and supporters of Biden, the Democrat presidential candidate. For instance, an article in The Guardian said Giuliani was seen “reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals.” Other media outlets, such as the Washington Post, NBC News, The Hill and Huffington Post, also put a similar spin on the story.
Critics, however, alleged bias by the media, which was seemingly eager to interpret a still shot from the yet-to-be-released 'Borat' movie after largely casting a blind eye to reports in the past week on a trove of emails found on a hard drive of a laptop allegedly belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter.
Also on rt.com Giuliani claims Hunter Biden’s laptop contained ‘numerous pictures of underage girls,’ says explicit material given to policeThe hard drive was reportedly given to Giuliani, as well as the FBI, by a Delaware repair-shop owner after Hunter allegedly failed to pay for repairs to his laptop and never returned to retrieve the computer.
The emails reveal questionable business dealings between the Bidens and a Ukrainian energy firm, and indicated that the former VP’s son wanted to enrich his family through his Chinese connections.
Journalist Robby Soave suggested that based on the reasoning Twitter gave for blocking the Biden stories, it also should have banned the Giuliani-Borat tweets because the material “contains personal information obtained in an underhanded way and without Giuliani's permission.”
Conservative author Mike Cernovich said the 'Borat' scene would qualify as “revenge porn” against Giuliani under New York law, as well as under Twitter's guidelines banning such content. Twitter allowed thousands of accounts to share the photo and portray it misleadingly, he said, adding that “the bias isn't subtle.” In fact, Twitter not only allowed the Giuliani posts to proliferate after censoring the New York Post's Hunter Biden stories; it even promoted the topic with its own trending link as part of an effort “to make high-quality information around the 2020 US elections more accessible.”
The press was so eager for Giuliani-incriminating news on Wednesday that a hoax suggesting that the former mayor had been duped by a college student pretending to be Ivanka Trump was apparently believed and tweeted out by such media figures as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and Politico editor David Freedlander. The student, Nick Roberts, pretended to trick Giuliani in a satirical exchange of fake text messages.
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