REVENGE PORN: U.S. Senator posts someone else’s nude photo without consent
Senator Ted Cruz, on the day after Elon Musk giddily released information about Twitter’s content moderation processes, took it upon himself to publicly post nude photos of the current president’s son.
President Joe Biden has never denied that his son, Hunter, has struggled with addiction and other issues that are often associated with it. Instead, he’s called for compassion, expressed his love and support for his child, and in leaked messages, we’ve seen him urging his son to get help.
Republicans, however, prefer to go for the salacious and have produced a photo that was allegedly found on the laptop that they say is Hunter’s, although their atrociously lax chain of custody makes it unlikely the public will ever know the truth of the real contents.
In this photo, the subject — reportedly Hunter — is lighting a pipe, lying nude on a couch, with genitals visible in the shot.
It’s hardly a surprise that a tabloid or the lowest of political operatives would be happy to publish this as an attack on the president (although the tabloid, at least, would probably censor it), but in this case, a sitting U.S. Senator seems to have decided it would be an appropriate thing to share on his Twitter timeline.
The screenshot shared below is censored; in Senator Cruz’s version, there was no black rectangle, only light blurring, but still very clearly a genital image.
Cruz’s share was a retweet of a post by a former Daily Caller writer, Greg Price, which featured a screenshot of an October 2020 post by James Woods. Woods had posted a fake Biden ad, which read “I’m on Team Joe” and would normally have featured a photo of the voter or endorser on the right, but was instead edited to include the Hunter photo.
Cruz’s only comment was an emoji of a pair of eyes.
After all, any father might contact a social media site to request the removal of their child’s (even if the child in question was an adult) nude photo, and Biden was not in a government position at the time.
Of course, the release also revealed that both candidates’ teams had reached out to request reviews of posts — and the other candidate, Donald Trump, was, in fact, at the very head of the U.S. government at the time, raising considerable First Amendment issues.
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
