Two weeks after banning The New York Post's reporting that exposed Joe Biden's apparent involvement in his son's overseas business activities, Twitter backed off on Friday and finally ended the ban on The Post's Twitter account.
The Post reports that Twitter demanded the newspaper founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton delete six tweets that linked to stories exposing Hunter Biden's overseas business activities and an apparent pay-to-play scheme involving Joe Biden before Twitter would restore access to The New York Post's account. Twitter appears to have made up out of whole cloth the allegation that The Post's reporting was based on hacked materials.
The Post never relented, and Twitter finally restored access to their account on Friday, four days before the election.
(Via The Post)
The company claimed The Post violated its policy on sharing “hacked materials” by tweeting links to bombshell exclusives on Biden’s emails — without ever saying how it came to that conclusion.
The move sparked widespread outrage that led Twitter to revise its policy so other users could tweet the stories.
But it continued to hold The Post’s account hostage — demanding the six tweets about its own reporting be deleted. They never were.
“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,” a Twitter representative told The Post on Oct. 16.
Twitter also made the six tweets at issue invisible to users by replacing them with messages saying, “This Tweet is no longer available.”
On Friday, the company said that under its latest policy revision, “Decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change.”
“We believe this is fair and appropriate,” Twitter said.
“This means that because a specific @nypost enforcement led us to update the Hacked Materials Policy, we will no longer restrict their account under the terms of the previous policy and they can now Tweet again.”
Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday and admitted that Twitter has no evidence to believe the Hunter Biden story was false and seemed unable to defend his company's assertion that the reporting was based on hacked materials.
Dorsey also testified under oath that anyone on Twitter could now share The Post's reporting, but Ted Cruz demonstrated after the hearing that Dorsey's claim wasn't true and Twitter was still censoring the story.
What @jack told the Senate, under oath, is false. I just tried to tweet the @nypost story alleging Biden’s CCP corruption.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 28, 2020
Still blocked.
18 USC 1621 makes it a felony to lie under oath to the Senate. https://t.co/BDHRB8CEzy
Dorsey and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 17 to answer questions about election interference and the censorship of The New York Post.