US-based Internet giants are scrubbing the search results and webpages of reference to alleged wrongdoing by US President Joe Biden's wayward son.
But now details of the conspiracy to wipe away his sins are finally coming to light.
During the 2020 presidential election campaign, social media giants Facebook* and Twitter blocked all mention of the New York Post's bombshell revelations from Hunter's abandoned "laptop from hell" — now the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. The newspaper's Twitter account was even suspended.
Internal Twitter company documents released after South African-born tech tycoon Elon Musk bought out the firm showed that senior staff colluded with the FBI to suppress the story.
The world's most-used Internet search engine also goes soft on Hunter Biden, directing users to his sanitized Wikipedia page or inoffensive questions about his family.
A Google search for "Hunter Biden" comes back with the suggested queries "Who are Jill Biden's children?" along with "Is Ashley Biden married?" and "Who is Joe Biden's wife?"
Screen grab of a Google search for 'Hunter Biden', listing related queries suggested by the search engine
Whitewashy-pedia
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has already tarnished its reputation for impartiality in its articles on Russia's government, media, and its special operation in Ukraine, as well as frequently describing conservative US political figures as "far-right" or "conspiracy theorists."
By contrast, the site's entry on Hunter Biden treads very softly around the controversial aspects of his life and career.
The second paragraph uncritically accepts Hunter's claim in his memoir that his "struggles" with drug and alcohol abuse "escalated" after the death of his brother Joseph "Beau" Biden III from brain cancer in 2015. But near the bottom of the article it admits that the president's son was given a waiver for a previous "drug-related incident" when he was commissioned as an officer in the US Navy Reserve in May 2013 — only to be dismissed a month later when a drug test found cocaine in his system.
Joe Biden has also cited the death of his son, who served a seven months in the US occupation of Iraq as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) office in 2009, to claim empathy with the parents of soldiers killed in his overseas military adventures.
The article also implies that the scandal over both Hunter and Joe Biden's refusal to acknowledge his paternity of his love-child Navy Joan, who he fathered in 2018 with Texas resident and former stripper Lunden Roberts, was only of concern to the "right-wing media."
The hand behind the sycophantic tone on Hunter Biden's Wikipedia entry was uncovered this week by investigative journalist Lee Fang.
When Biden was hade a director of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — along with his business partner Devon Archer — he hired major US firm FTI Consulting to continually edit his page and those of his new employers.
Hunter's appointment followed the 2014 Euromaidan coup engineered by the US Obama administration that his father served in as vice president. Joe Biden even threatened to withhold aid to the regime of then-President Petro Poroshenko until he sacked Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and ended probes into corruption at Burisma.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang exposes how Hunter Biden paid a consulting firm to whitewash his Wikipedia page and those of his foreign clients
Investigative journalist Lee Fang exposes how Hunter Biden paid a consulting firm to whitewash his Wikipedia page and those of his foreign clients
The Wikipedia article dismissing the whole saga as the "Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory" is still up on the site, unlike that of his US investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners.
'CIA-pedia'
Political scientist and author Aaron Good told Sputnik that Wikpedia plays a role in "the misinforming of the American public."
"If you are a critic of US foreign policy, and especially on controversial issues like political assassinations and intelligence connections to drug running and so on, you know that Wikipedia is unreliable," Good said. "You could basically call it CIA-pedia."
"That's a lot of PR work to do for a firm to deal with a guy who is, you know, has been involved in graft and has had some children out of wedlock with, you know, dancers, exotic dancers, let's say, and who has been on tape doing sexual things. And he was performing sexual acts that he wanted to record on his laptop along with him smoking crack at different times."
He pointed out that the Hunter Biden contract must be hard work for FTI Consulting, given all the scandals that surround him — political influence peddling, illegitimate children, and numerous photos and videos from his laptop hard-drive of him smoking crack cocaine, cavorting with strippers, and sleeping with prostitutes.
"This is a guy whose image... the PR firm is going to have their work cut out for them, so it's not surprising that he would do it," Good said. "But it all points to the sad state of our regime at this moment. I mean, this guy is the son of the president."
The public are "professionally and perpetually disinformed and misinformed and misled, and Wikipedia is a part of that. And I think it was probably set up to be something like that," the author said.
"The way that it's supposed to be free and open and anybody can do it is like so perfect because it's kind of a microcosm of like the free press in the United States," Good stressed. "Anybody can edit it, but who really is going to have the wherewithal to have a bunch of people editing articles on different subjects? It's going to be just as everything else in the society, people with money are going to be able to take advantage of of the 'level playing field.'"
*Facebook is designated as extremist in Russia.