Twitter reinstates New York Post account

Social-media company reverses policy that previously required newspaper to delete old tweets before being able to tweet again.

Twitter said the decision was ‘fair and appropriate’. Picture: AFP

Twitter Inc. on Friday unlocked the New York Post’s Twitter account, ending a stalemate between the social-media company and the newspaper stemming from the latter’s publication of stories it said were based on documents allegedly obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden.

“We’re baaaaaaack,” the Post’s Twitter account tweeted on Friday afternoon, just minutes after Twitter said that it was reversing its policies in a way that would allow the Post to be reinstated.

“We believe this is fair and appropriate,” the company said in its tweet announcing the rule change.

The Post had been unable to tweet to its 1.9 million Twitter followers since Oct. 14, the date it began publishing a series of stories based on the alleged Hunter Biden material.

Twitter initially said that linking to the Post stories violated the social-media company’s policies against posting material that contains personal information and is obtained via hacking. As the story broke, Twitter began preventing users from tweeting the stories and it locked the Post’s account, saying it would be unlocked only after it deleted earlier tweets that linked to the stories.

At the time the Post published its stories, the provenance of the Hunter Biden data was in question. The Post said the data came from a laptop that was abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop and eventually was obtained by a lawyer representing President Trump’s personal counsel, Rudy Giuliani.

Hunter Biden is the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Twitter treated the Post’s stories as if they were based on hacked material and blocked them because they contained personal information and the source of the material was unclear, Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said Wednesday during questioning by the Senate Commerce Committee. “We didn’t want Twitter to be a distributor for hacked materials,” he said. “We made a fast decision.” At the same hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had recently warned his company to be on alert for possible “hack and leak” operations leading up to the U.S. election. Facebook slowed the spread of the Post articles but didn’t block them completely.

Saturday’s front page of the New York Post.

The Biden campaign has disputed the allegations at the center of the Post’s reporting, but not the authenticity of the Hunter Biden data.

By Oct. 16, Twitter had reversed policy and was allowing the story to be linked in tweets, but the company continued to insist that the Post remove its earlier tweets, saying that they were in violation Twitter’s policy at the time they were posted.

That left the Post unable to tweet until Friday, when Twitter revised its policies again. In a series of tweets, the company said it was modifying its policy that had previously prohibited retroactively overturning prior enforcement, in part so that a similar situation wouldn’t occur in the future. In regard to the Post, Twitter said it would “no longer restrict their account under the terms of the previous policy and they can now tweet again.” News Corp, the corporate parent of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., also owns the New York Post.

“This is an important moment for journalism and for the freedom of the press,” said Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for News Corp. in a statement. He said “the arbitrary blocking of the Post was a significant moment during a critical time in this election season. It also had a negative commercial impact, but the Post team was determined that principle should prevail and it has.” Mr. Dorsey faced harsh criticism over its handling of the Post story during the Wednesday Commerce hearing.

“Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report?” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) during the hearing, Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal