Twitter Changes Policy After Backlash For Blocking New York Post’s Hunter Biden Story

Twitter changed its policy regarding hacked materials after blowback from the social network’s decision to ban links to a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, CNBC reports.

The Post published a dubiously sourced article including several debunked claims and featuring emails apparently taken off Hunter Biden’s laptop that he left at a repair shop and never picked up.

Twitter blocked links to the article, citing its doxxing policy, because the article included personal email addresses and phone numbers, and its hacked materials policy.

CEO Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that the company’s handling of the story was “not great.”

Twitter changes hacked materials policy:

Many reporters noted that Twitter’s comment on the hacked materials policy would make prominent blockbuster investigations like the Panama Papers prohibited on the social network.

The company’s legal, policy and trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde announced on Thursday that it would amend the policy.

“Why the changes? We want to address the concerns that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and others in ways that are contrary to Twitter’s purpose of serving the public conversation,” she wrote.

She said the network would not label tweets to “provide people with additional context” rather than removing the tweets.

“We will no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them,” she wrote. “We will label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter.”

Trump rages at Twitter:

Trump raged at the social network after it locked the accounts of his campaign and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the link.

“When they take down Kayleigh McEnany, who is just an honorable — she’s an incredible person, when they don’t want to put up the Biden story ... the whole thing is crazy,” Trump told Fox Business.

“It’s all going to end up in a big lawsuit,” he said. “Things can happen that are very severe, that I’d rather not see happen, but it’s probably going to have to.”

Trump later appeared to fall for a satirical article that linked an unrelated Twitter outage to the company’s efforts to censor the story.

 

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