Chennai: A day after popular microblogging site Twitter took down links to a controversial New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s alleged business dealings in Ukraine, it announced changed its rules about taking down hacked content—and says they will no longer do so.
The story 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.
However now, 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 added.