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Twitter was heavily criticized for blocking a controversial article about US presidential candidate Biden and his son’s business. Now the short message service is changing its rules.
Twitter changes its rules following controversy over blocking a controversial newspaper article about Joe Biden. Content captured by piracy in the future will only be blocked in cases where hackers have posted it directly, Twitter manager Vijaya Gadde said. The short message service wanted to take into account the unintended consequences for journalists, among others.
The New York Post newspaper reported Wednesday that an email found in a notebook at a repair shop indicated a meeting between presidential candidate Joe Biden and a business associate of his son Hunter Biden in 2015.
A spokesman for Biden’s campaign team told Politico there was never such a meeting. Biden always said that he had not spoken to his son about his business activities. US President Donald Trump is trying to draw attention to the report almost three weeks before the election.
Twitter blocked links to the article
As of Wednesday afternoon, Twitter did not allow users to post or send more links to the article and initially justified it with a violation of the rules for content stolen by piracy. Later, the service pointed out that the alleged emails shown in the report contained revealed email addresses. The procedure drew criticism from Republicans.
The head of the telecommunications regulator FCC, Ajit Pai, announced as a result of the controversy that his authority wanted to clarify a rule in force since the 1990s that regulates the management of content on online platforms. The provisions of “Section 230” are sometimes interpreted too broadly, giving Internet companies too broad protection.
In accordance with “Section 230”, online services are not responsible for content posted by users. At the same time, it gives them wide latitude to take action against certain content or users. Regulation has significantly shaped today’s web. Trump accuses Facebook and Twitter of suppressing conservative views and calls for the abolition of “Section 230”.
In the future there will be warnings instead of blocks.
In 2018, Twitter introduced rules against the dissemination of material from hacker attacks, also in response to the publication of emails allegedly stolen by the Democratic Party in the latest outbreak of the 2016 US election campaign.
Meanwhile, new tools such as warning notices have been introduced in the short message service, explained Twitter manager Gadde, who justified the changes. Therefore, in the future, the links will generally receive warnings rather than prevent their distribution. The rules against publishing personal information remained unchanged, Gadde emphasized.
Twitter would have taken action against the “New York Post” article anyway, which also applies to a follow-up post on Thursday. Emails reported that Hunter Biden tried to cash in on his father’s office as vice president of the United States at a Chinese company. The authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed. How these reached the public is also questionable.
Trump Guiliani confidant involved
The “New York Post” received a hard drive copy of the notebook from Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, over the weekend. The copy was made by the repair shop owner before the FBI seized the laptop in December 2019.
The shop owner told CBS broadcaster that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden had returned three laptops to him in April 2019. However, he could not confirm the identity because he was visually impaired. The NBC broadcaster reported that US investigators were verifying whether there was a connection between the emails allegedly found on the computer with a foreign intelligence operation.
Target of a Russian secret service operation
Trump has long tried to attack Biden for his son’s previous activities in China and Ukraine. His confidant Giuliani is a key figure. He had tried to get Ukraine to investigate Biden. The Washington Post reported, citing four former government officials, that US intelligence agencies had warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the target of a Russian intelligence operation. It was feared that Giuliani would be used to transmit false Russian information directly to the president.
Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump in a personal conversation that the information Giuliani would bring with him from Ukraine should be considered “tainted by Russia,” the Washington Post reported. Trump is said to have simply shrugged.
Hunter Biden was a member of the supervisory board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma between 2014 and 2019. Trump accused Biden, among other things, of using his vice presidency to try to protect his son from the Ukrainian judiciary. Biden rejects that. Trump wanted to get investigations in Ukraine. The conflict sparked an impeachment process against Trump, which failed in February due to a Republican majority in the Senate.
