No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election

One of the indefensible assertions that’s reemerged in recent days is that social media companies’ efforts to limit sharing of a New York Post story in October 2020 cost Donald Trump that year’s presidential election.

This is a long-standing claim, made newly salient with new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s release last week of internal documents about the decision to impose that limit. His intent was to suggest that pre-him Twitter was a place where conservative arguments were unfairly censored. But others, like former president Donald Trump, have gone further, suggesting that this action alone led to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

There’s no reason to believe this is true.

It is certainly the case that the narrow margins of victory enjoyed by Joe Biden in several states that year might have moved one way or the other had small things shifted. Close races are the bane of outside observers and a boon to campaign consultants — identifying any particular thing as decisive is impossible but claiming that any particular element was essential is easy. So there is no way to say, for example, that a counterfactual in which Twitter didn’t limit sharing of the Post’s story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop wouldn’t have moved Arizona from benefiting Biden by 10,500 votes to giving Trump a slight advantage.