Twitter unblocked the New York Post’s account on Oct. 30, ending a two-week standoff between it and the paper after the latter published a story the paper alleged was based on documents obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop. “We’re back,” the New York Post’s Twitter account tweeted that afternoon, just minutes after Twitter said it was reversing its policy in a way that would allow the Post to resume.
The New York Post’s report was allegedly based on messages from emails and text messages stored on Hunter Biden’s laptop that was sent for repair. But the pro-Democratic mainstream U.S. media and parts of the intelligence community have claimed that the source of the documents “may be related to Russian interference,” a claim that has not been corroborated by hard evidence. Among the stories reported by the New York Post is that, according to email records the paper obtained from a Delaware laptop sent for repair in Delaware, where Biden was a longtime senator, Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company, Brisma, emailed Hunter on April 17, 2015 -Biden, thanking him for helping him introduce then-U.S. Vice President Biden in Washington. Earlier, Trump supporters had been accusing Hunter Biden and his associates of having conflicts of interest with Biden’s political office over their business activities in Ukraine during the Obama administration. Biden himself has insisted that he had no knowledge of his second son’s business practices. Subsequent reports in the paper also mentioned allegations about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Chinese companies.
After the story broke, Twitter and Facebook blocked a number of accounts on their respective platforms for retweeting the story as “inaccurate,” causing not only the New York Post editor in question to be unable to tweet a link to his own article, but also White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McInerney (D-N.Y.), who was also a member of the group. (McEnany), both of whose personal accounts had been suspended outright. In a tweet explaining the action, Twitter’s public safety department wrote that the New York Post article contained images with personal information in violation of its platform rules, and also violated Twitter’s policy against uploading articles containing material that had been stolen by hackers.
However, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s position seems to have changed since then. He posted that “the outright blocking of URLs was wrong”. Twitter has also said that it has revised its policies related to hacking, but will continue to block that article about Biden. The apparent suppression of the article and the New York Post, however, sparked outrage among pro-Trump Republicans. Many netizens have angrily denounced the two social media platforms as stifling freedom of speech and press freedom and blocking the truth, with some even accusing them of interfering in the U.S. election and helping the Democrats fight Trump, and calling for an immediate investigation into the two platforms for interfering in the election and blocking the truth.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, were all called to testify in video form. At the meeting, the senators accused the tech bosses of censorship of freedom of the press. “Mr. Dorsey, who the fuck elected you? Who put you in charge of regulating what content media can report and what information the American public is allowed to listen to?” At one point, Republican Senator Ted Cruz questioned Dossier this way during a question-and-answer session (Ted Cruz ). For his part, Dorsey insisted that Twitter was not censored. Now, under the threat of Congress or pressure to revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Twitter has unblocked the New York Post’s account, saying, “Our policy is flexible.
Section 230 of the US Communications Code Law reads, among other things, “Neither the user nor the provider of a web service shall be considered a publisher or spokesperson for other content providers and shall not be liable for content provided by third parties.” It’s worth noting that on the day the Twitter account was unblocked, the New York Post posted a report that the newspaper’s Twitter account had added about 190,000 followers during the blocking period. According to the analytics tool website Social Blade, that number means that the paper’s Twitter followers grew by 10.6 percent in just about two weeks.
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