Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted that the social media giant’s censorship of a New York Post story alleging Joe Biden’s involvement in a foreign lobbying scandal was “wrong”.
The controversy began on Wednesday when the Post, citing leaked emails, claimed Hunter Biden had introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive in a Ukrainian energy firm a year before Biden pressured the government of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
Twitter quickly followed up by determining the information to be a violation of its “hacked materials” policy and blocked users from both tweeting a link to the article and sending it to each other via direct message.
Numerous prominent Twitter users were also locked out of their accounts for attempting to post the story and Twitter even blocked a link to the Republican Republican Judiciary website at house.gov that carried a copy of the New York Post article.
After a firestorm of complaints and the prospect of being dragged before another Republican committee, Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter had made a mistake.
“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,” tweeted Dorsey.
Dorsey’s climb down is remarkable, but his admission that blocking URLs is “wrong” apparently doesn’t extend to other websites that are blocked by the platform.
As numerous respondents to Dorsey pointed out, both video hosting websites BitChute and Banned.video are still blocked by Twitter.
