Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Oct. 28 that the New York Post’s account on the social media platform will continue to be locked until the newspaper deletes a tweet that linked to its reporting about Hunter Biden’s alleged overseas business dealings.
Biden’s campaign has denied the meeting ever took place, although a whistleblower who had a business partnership with the Bidens has gone on the record to say the former vice president was deeply involved in his son’s overseas affairs.
Biden and his campaign have denied any knowledge of Hunter Biden’s business ties.
“You’re still blocking their posts. ... Can the New York Post post on their Twitter account?” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Dorsey during a virtual Senate Commerce Committee hearing.
The New York Post “can log into their account” and “delete their original tweet that fell under our original enforcement actions” before posting again, Dorsey said in response. “They can tweet the exact same ... article and it would go through.”
In mid-October, Twitter announced that it changed its policy following backlash to its perceived censorship of users who shared the Post’s report, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and a Trump campaign account.
“While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively. You will still need to delete the tweet to regain access to your account,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Post on Oct. 15.
During the hearing, Dorsey made reference to the updated policy in the exchange with Cruz. Before the Post’s article was blocked, Dorsey cited a “hacked materials policy” that was created in 2018.
“The policy is around limiting the spread of materials that were hacked,” Dorsey said, adding that “it is unclear how those materials were obtained.”
There’s no evidence that the Post’s report was based on hacked materials. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he provided the Post with a laptop hard drive that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, which was reportedly left at a computer repair shop in Delaware last year and never picked up. Reports have suggested that whoever left the laptop at the store never paid their bill.
Cruz later claimed that Dorsey, Twitter, and Facebook “made the unilateral” decision to block the Post over its reporting on the Bidens’ dealings with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings and a Chinese Communist Party-linked firm.
Dorsey flatly rejected Cruz’s assertions that Twitter is attempting to censor the New York Post or other news outlets, saying they have to agree to Twitter’s “terms of service.”
