Twitter has refused to unlock The Post’s account unless the news organization deletes six tweets about its own reporting on Hunter Biden’s emails — despite a policy change sparked by outrage over that very same social-media suppression of the stories.
In a Friday afternoon email, a Twitter representative told The Post, “While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively. You will still need to delete the Tweets to regain access to your account.”
The demand that The Post remove links to its own stories came even though a new policy announced Thursday night allows other users to tweet the very same links.
“Over the last 24 hours, we’ve received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday,” wrote Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead”. “After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it.”
The company will no longer remove hacked content “unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them” and will instead “label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter.”
Meanwhile, anyone who looks at The Post’s Twitter feed can’t even see the tweets about the Biden stories, which have been replaced by messages saying, “This Tweet is no longer available.”
Twitter hasn’t responded to an inquiry from The Post asking how it determined that the stories in question were allegedly based on “hacked materials.” Information in the reports came from data extracted from a MacBook Pro laptop that a Delaware repair shop owner has said was dropped off in April 2019 but never picked up.
The response to Twitter’s actions includes a complaint filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission by the Republican National Committee, which claims the company made an “illegal corporate in-kind political contribution” to Joe Biden’s campaign.
Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have also said that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would be subpoenaed to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
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