Twitter remains a target for those concerned with censorship. Wednesday’s bombshell report on Hunter Biden published by the New York Post was repeatedly blocked by Twitter. Now, the social media giant is tweaking its rules and approach to “hacked content” and how it shares links on its platform. The new policies basically just reinforce what the company has already done, choosing to continue to block the Hunter Biden stories from the New York Post.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of policy, tweeted a thread on Thursday evening saying the platform would “no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them.” Instead, Twitter plans to label tweets with context instead of blocking them. The New York Post story is, however, still blocked.
Gadde also talked about their hacking policy going back a couple years. “We put the Hacked Materials Policy in place back in 2018 to discourage and mitigate harms associated with hacks and unauthorized exposure of private information,” he said. “We tried to find the right balance between people’s privacy and the right of free expression, but we can do better.”
Conservative comedian Tim Young blasted Twitter, on Twitter, for its hypocrisy. “I must’ve missed social media companies standing up against illegally leaked documents when that Trump tax return story was pushed everywhere a few weeks ago,” he remarked.
Even as the New York Post story remains blocked, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted Friday morning that, “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.” The GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee reportedly plans to subpoena Dorsey to appear on Capitol Hill as early as next week. Unfortunately for Dorsey, he won’t be able to block his appearance in front of some ticked-off senators.
Add comment