As the New York Post story about Joe and Hunter Biden’s connections with Ukraine dropped, it was clear that it was not going to be a very good day for the Democratic nominee. It also ended up being a “not great” day for Twitter.
The New York Post story dropped on Wednesday morning, and some people found it curious how the expected viral social media spread was basically nonexistent. As it turned out, there was a reason for that. Twitter started blocking posts of those who tried to share the story, even blocking members of the New York Post from sharing it.
“This is a Big Tech information coup. This is digital civil war,” said New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari in a tweet. “I, an editor at the New York Post, one of the nation’s largest papers by circulation, can’t post one of our own stories that details corruption by a major-party presidential candidate, Biden.”
Twitter also locked the New York Post’s main Twitter account for much of the day on Wednesday as they seemed to take extraordinary steps to block the story from being shared.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addressed the company’s blocking of the stories on his personal Twitter account: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great, and blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM (direct message) with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
In a multi-post explanation on Wednesday night, Twitter stated that their “hacking policy” was the reason for blocking the distribution of the story.
Facebook took a similar path on the New York Post report, saying they were “reducing its distribution on the platform” as the story “is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” in order to establish that it isn’t misinformation.
Misinformation? Something else? Depends whom you talk to.
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