Twitter issued a stunning policy reversal Thursday, changing a rule about hacked materials that resulted in blocking a controversial New York Post story about the alleged emails of Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son, The Washington Post is reporting.
The link to the New York Post story will still be blocked under a policy that prohibits sharing people’s personal information, the company said.
Late Thursday night, Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde tweeted that the company made the decision after receiving “feedback” over the past 24 hours that the policy on hacked materials as written could result in undue censorship of journalists and whistleblowers. Going forward, the company will remove content only if it’s directly posted by hackers or those acting in concert with them. It will label more questionable tweets.
The late-night move reflected the challenges of real-time decision-making being made by Silicon Valley companies in the name of protecting public discussion during a presidential election that has been marred by disinformation and misleading news. Tech companies are intent on avoiding a repeat of the 2016 election, when their platforms were exploited by Russian operatives. As a result, they have issued a host of new rules and have taken some highly unusual actions, including censoring a major U.S. media company.
“Content moderation is incredibly difficult, especially in the critical context of an election. We are trying to act responsibly & quickly to prevent harms, but we’re still learning along the way,” Gadde, who leads the company’s legal, policy, and trust and safety divisions, wrote,
Facebook and Twitter take unusual steps to limit spread of New York Post story
On Wednesday, Twitter blocked the link to the article in which President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and former top adviser Stephen K. Bannon claimed to have obtained and leaked a trove of private materials from Hunter Biden. The leaked documents suggested that at one point he gave a Ukrainian executive the “opportunity” to meet the former vice president. The Biden campaign said his schedule indicated no such meeting took place.
The story surged to the top of Twitter’s trending topics list before it was censored.
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