Twitter has reinstated the account of The New York Post which was blocked after it published the controversial story about Hunter Biden, the son of presidential candidate Joe Biden, and tweeted it six times with the link to the story.
The micro-blogging platform on Friday unlocked the New York Post’s account, ending a logjam between it and the newspaper.
“We’re baaaaaaack,” the Post’s Twitter account tweeted after Twitter said it was reversing its policies in a way that would allow the account to be reinstated.
On October 15, Twitter’s trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde had tweeted that the company would “no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them”.
The next day, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that blocking the URL “was wrong”.
In a reversal of its earlier stance, Twitter finally decided to allow users to share the Post article.
The company allowed the distribution of the article because the once-private information in the article has now been made widely available across the Internet.
Twitter introduced the “Hacked Materials Policy” back in 2018 to discourage and mitigate the harm associated with hacks and unauthorized exposure of private information.
A Twitter spokesperson told The New York Times that the information that was previously “private information” had spread so widely that it no longer counted as “private.”
Facebook also limited the spread of the story, saying the story had made unverified claims about Hunter Biden’s Ukraine business and therefore the story was eligible for third-party fact-checking.
