Google searches for ‘Joe Biden corruption’ spiking

Facebook and Twitter have come under fire recently for their draconian measures taken against anything that could make presidential hopeful Joe Biden look bad, and have even been subpoenaed to explain their actions to two separate US Senate committees in an ongoing investigation into possible interference in the election process.

Now, google searches for the phrase 'Joe Biden corruption' are skyrocketing, as pointed out in a recent report from The Western Journal.

Beyond that, their blocking of key posts has let to consternation among many of their users, and appears to have created a Streisand effect, where people are more curious than ever to find out about what's really going on, according to the Western Journal. The term "Streisand effect" is used to refer to the unintended results that come from attempted suppression of a concept, drawing exponentially more attention to it, and in turn exact opposite of the desired outcome.

The centre of the current controversy is the now uber-viral article from the NY Post, where emails from an external drive and a laptop left at a repair shop were published, revealing damning evidence against Hunter Biden and his father Joe, including evidence that the elder Biden had lied to the public on more than one occasion. This includes specifically the time he said he had "never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings", which is clearly contradicted in the emails.

Facebook and Twitter's initial response was to completely block the article, block the accounts of everyone posting it, and block the NY Post's own account as well. Twitter even went as far as blocking the account of the White House's Press Secretary. There were reports of Facebook going as far as to censor private messages containing content they saw as potentially damaging to Biden's campaign.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also claimed on one occasion testifying before Senator Ted Cruz that Twitter had already unblocked the post. Cruz tried to tweet it from his phone right there, and it appeared that the post was still blocked. It wasn't until Friday that Twitter finally unblocked the post as he had claimed.

Searches for "Donald Trump corruption", in comparison, have remained constant.