As 2020 hurtles to a close with Americans storming the voting booths, many of them desperately hoping to return the country to “normal,” events are already promising anything but. As grim previews of the future to come, we’ve already seen apocalyptic fires on the West Coast, a Republican who can sell Trumpism better than Trump, and a Supreme Court nominee who makes Antonin Scalia look like a moderate. And now we’re getting a taste of how tech monopolies will use their power in the years ahead to censor reporting that clashes with their political interests.

On Wednesday, the New York Post published a major story about the Biden-Burisma affair (aka “Ukrainegate”), the still-developing controversy over Hunter Biden’s presence on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma at the same time that his father, then vice president, spearheaded anti-corruption efforts in the country and ultimately fired the prosecutor investigating the company.

The Post published e-mails purportedly drawn from a copied computer hard drive that belonged to the younger Biden, allegedly showing a Burisma executive thanking him for introducing him to the then–vice president, and imploring Hunter to “use your influence to convey a message/signal etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions” — meaning the “one or more pretrial proceedings” the Ukrainian government had launched against the company.