Twitter CEO Says Blocking New York Post Hunter Biden Story Was ‘Mistake’
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said his company’s decision to block a New York Post story on Hunter Biden in October 2020 was a “mistake,” but did not reveal who made the decision, in remarks at a House hearing on Thursday.
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them [the Post] in any particular way,” Dorsey told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in comments reported by the Post.
Representative Steve Scalise (R., La.) asked Dorsey during the hearing if any employee was “held accountable” for blocking the Post‘s account.
“[For] their entire account to be blocked for two weeks by a mistake seems like a really big mistake,” Scalise said. “Was anyone held accountable in your censoring department for that mistake?”
Dorsey responded that “we don’t have a censoring department,” claiming that the company did not directly block the Post‘s account.
“We required them to delete the tweet and then they could tweet it again,” Dorsey said.
Twitter initially removed the Post story, which was based on emails between Hunter Biden and an executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, citing its “hacked materials” policy. At the time, the policy forbade uploading content “obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.”
On October 30, two weeks after the story broke, Twitter relented and unlocked the Post‘s account. Dorsey has previously stated that the decision to block the Post story was “wrong.”
