We were wrong to block Hunter Biden story: ex-Twitter staffers

Executives tell house oversight committee that mistakes stemmed from limited information, not pressure from government officials.

Jim Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth and Anika Collier Navaroli testify on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

Former Twitter executives on Wednesday said they erred in limiting the reach of news articles about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election, but denied Republican assertions that there were political motivations involved.

Twitter blocked the sharing of links to two New York Post articles containing disclosures from emails found on the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son out of concern that they might have been obtained by hacking, the executives said at hearing convened by the House of Representatives oversight committee.

“In that moment, with limited information, Twitter made a mistake,” said Yoel Roth, the social media platform’s former global head of trust and safety, at the hearing.

Republicans on the panel summoned Mr Roth and other former Twitter leaders in charge of content moderation. They said Twitter’s decision to temporarily block links to the articles appeared to be aimed at protecting Mr Biden, a presidential candidate at the time, from damaging disclosures.

“We’ve witnessed Big Tech autocrats wield their unchecked power to suppress the speech of Americans to promote their preferred political opinions,” Repunlican James Comer, chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks.

The former Twitter executives pushed back on those claims, saying the decision about the Post articles wasn’t based on political leanings. The Post and The Australian are both owned by News Corp.

“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said Jim Baker, Twitter’s former deputy general counsel and a former top lawyer at the FBI.

Mr Roth said Twitter had been warned by law enforcement about the risk of a Russia-linked effort to leak hacked documents ahead of the election — similar to the 2016 leak of internal emails from the campaign of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. After the articles were published, some former national security officials said in a public letter that they suspected the materials might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

“It would have been foolish not to consider the possibility that [Russia] would run that play again,” Mr Roth said. He said the law-enforcement warnings weren’t specific to Hunter Biden.

Democrats said the government’s engagement with social media companies was aimed at fighting harms that could stem from false or misleading claims spreading online. “This isn’t about censorship. It’s about protecting our democracy from misinformation,” said representative Summer Lee. They also noted that Republican officials, too, have pressed the companies about content decisions.

Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, accused Republicans of creating “a faux scandal”. He cited examples of Twitter allowing conservative ideas to spread, such as Donald Trump’s false claims in late 2020 that he won the election that year.

Another witness, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, said she approved Twitter’s blocking of the Post’s articles, but said it later “became clear that Twitter had not fully appreciated the potential impact of the policy on the free press and others”. She disputed the notion, raised by Republicans, that Twitter’s move had a substantial impact on the public conversation ahead of the election. “People could and did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or anywhere else, including other, much larger platforms,” she said.

The Twitter executives’ decision occurred in the month before the November 3, 2020, election, when the Trump administration was still in power.

Citing its rules regarding the distribution of hacked materials, Twitter blocked users from posting links to two Post articles and locked the newspaper’s Twitter account. Twitter later reversed course, allowing links within two days and unlocking the Post’s account after a two-week standoff.

Republicans, who took control of the House after the 2022 mid-term elections, also maintained at the hearing that the Democratic-led Biden administration has pressured Twitter and other social-media companies to censor conservative views on topics such as Covid-19 vaccines.

The laptop articles incident occurred before Twitter’s acquisition last year by Elon Musk, who contends that Twitter’s previous leaders were too heavy-handed in trying to police users’ speech.

Mr Musk last year released internal Twitter documents that provided fuel for Wednesday’s hearing. The documents, which were provided to a small group of journalists, included internal messages about how to handle the Post’s articles and regular communications between Twitter and law-enforcement officials.

The documents displayed on Wednesday by Republicans included screenshots of an internal Twitter interface about the accounts of two widely followed conservative commentators. The commentators had been placed on a “search blacklist” that limited the reach of their tweets, the documents showed.

Mr Roth said that Twitter maintained “visibility filtering” tools that could limit the reach of users’ content without the users’ knowledge. Pressed by Republican Jim Jordan about whether those tools were applied to elected officials, Mr Roth said: “It wouldn’t surprise me”.

Republican Lauren Boebert said she recently had been told by a Twitter staff member that her account had filters applied to it. “You silenced members of congress from communicating with their constituents, ” she said.

Also testifying Wednesday was a witness called by Democrats, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter safety specialist. She spoke privately last year to a separate congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, telling investigators that the company failed to act on evidence that the platform was being used to incite that day’s violence.

“Twitter’s leadership bent and broke their own rules in order to protect some of the most dangerous speech on the platform,” she said on Wednesday. Referring to the power of decision makers at large social media platforms, she added: “There is way too much power concentrated in the hands of too few.”

The Wall Street Journal