It's so weird that the big social media platforms simultaneously decided to throw away their "platform, not a publisher" protection to suppress a flimsy nothingburger story that should be like the buzzing of flies to a candidate with an insurmountable lead in the polls.

It almost makes you wonder if maybe that candidate knew even worse revelations were coming, so he got in touch with his very dear friends at the social media giants and told them to crush the early releases at all costs, to shut the whole chain of stories down.

DNC Media long ago mastered the art of the soft embargo. They simply refuse to amplify stories that don't fit their precious political narratives, while the stories that DO fit get wall-to-wall coverage. They don't confront Democrats about inconvenient stories.

We know all the tricks by heart: "Republicans pounce" framing, changing the subject, whataboutism, attacking the sources of inconvenient stories, downplaying them as "old news" or "debunked" when they really aren't.

For Big Tech to instantly leap directly to Chinese Communist-style hard embargoes - clumsy, obvious, and coordinated suppression of information, so ham-fisted that it clearly risks bringing government regulators down on their heads - over a trifling story seems illogical.

All the soft embargo tools were readily available. They could have said it was just "old news," everybody knows Hunter Biden is a train wreck. They could have used "Republicans pounce" to wave the whole thing off as a partisan smear. No way they'd ask Joe Biden for comment.

But instead they instantly leaped to an unprecedented level of China-style hard oppression that was all but guaranteed to make the story a much bigger deal, and their actions could well have disastrous repercussions for the Big Tech companies. And this fallout was predictable.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the New York Post isn't some internet rando with 100 followers who can be squashed without blowback, or to see that people become 1,000 times more interested in a story they are arrogantly ordered not to read.

And it's predictable that this hard embargo tactic would raise deafening cries of election interference, because it obviously IS. No bubble is thick enough to keep the people who did this from seeing what the response would be, but they did it anyway, without hesitation. /end