Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that. https://t.co/ZLUw3YD887
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2020
CEO Jack Dorsey unofficially apologized for Twitter’s handling of the story on VP Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
The New York Post reportedly extensively this week on emails that appear to be from an old laptop belonging to the younger Biden, and that paint a picture of the Biden family benefitting extensively from influence peddling to foreign officials.
When the news first broke, Twitter (along with Facebook and YouTube) blocked links to the story, and suspended and banned accounts that attempted to share it, calling the content “unsafe.” Twitter cited its policy of not publishing “hacked” materials as reason for the censorship.
“Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that,” Dorsey tweeted yesterday morning.
The Biden campaign, while calling the story part of a “smear campaign,” to date, has not disputed the authenticity of the emails.
Twitter now says it will no longer remove hacked content unless the content has been “directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them,” and that it will “label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter.”
As many users pointed out however, Twitter still seems to ban content from URL’s it does not favor.
Why is Bitchute still blocked?
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 16, 2020
dude you block Bitchute
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) October 16, 2020
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 16, 2020