San Francisco, (Asian independent) In a reversal of its earlier stance, Twitter finally decided to allow users to share an article criticising Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son.
The move came after the microblogging platform faced criticism from some users and US President Donald Trump for its move the block the article.
Twitter took the decision to block the distribution of the article on its platform on Wednesday, but reversed the controversial editorial decision on Friday, CNBC reported.
The company allowed the distribution of the article because the once-private information in the article has now been made widely available across the Internet, said the report, citing a company spokesperson.
Facing a backlash over blocking the news article, Twitter on Thursday decided to make changes to its hacked materials policy.
Twitter introduced the “Hacked Materials Policy” back in 2018 to discourage and mitigate the harm associated with hacks and unauthorised exposure of private information.
After the New York Post published a series of stories citing emails, purportedly sent by Biden’s son, Twitter blocked users from posting pictures of the emails, citing its rules against sharing “content obtained through hacking that contains private information.”
Twitter said it wanted to change this policy because it thinks that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and others in ways “that are contrary to Twitter’s purpose of serving the public conversation.
Twitter, however, then still blocked the article citing its privacy policy, before changing the decision on Friday.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Thursday that the initial blocking of the article without explanation was not the right decision.
“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,” Dorsey said in a tweet.
Facebook also limited the spread of the story, saying the story had made unverified claims about Hunter Biden’s Ukraine business and therefore the story was eligible for third-party fact-checking.
