Twitter revises policy on hacked materials after blocking Hunter Biden story

A day after Twitter took down links to a controversial New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s alleged business dealings in Ukraine, the social media platform has changed its rules about taking down hacked content—and says they will no longer do so.

The story, which relied on documents retrieved from a hard drive belonging to Hunter, had been taken down whenever it was shared and led to many Twitter accounts being blocked including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the official Donald Trump campaign account.

The reason cited was that the story violated norms around ‘hacked’ material and that parts of it contained “personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers” which Twitter said violated their rules.

Now, however, according to Twitter’s Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, the policy is changing. “Over the last 24 hours, we’ve received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it,” Gadde tweeted.

“We put the Hacked Materials Policy in place back in 2018 to discourage and mitigate harms associated with hacks and unauthorized exposure of private information. We tried to find the right balance between people’s privacy and the right of free expression, but we can do better. We’ve recently added new product capabilities, such as labels to provide people with additional context. We are no longer limited to Tweet removal as an enforcement action,” she said.

“We believe that labeling Tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the public interest and public conversation. The Hacked Material Policy is being updated to reflect these new enforcement capabilities.”

According to her, Twitter will “no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them” and will “label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter”.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who had himself criticised the move to block the offensive tweets, retweeted and commented on the changes.

“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 tweeted.

The incident added fuel to fire in terms of strengthening allegations from conservatives that social media platforms like Twitter (which has clashed with Trump in the past over false statements made by him) and Facebook are biased against them.

Trump later tweeted a satirical story claiming Twitter had taken its entire network down to prevent negative stories about Biden from spreading—without appearing to have known the story was satire.

The New York Post have doubled down on their story, saying the documents they found include personal messages from Hunter as well as a collection of porn (which they said they would not publish).