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On Friday night, worldwide access to Twitter was interrupted for about two hours. Chief Engineer Michael Montano later surrendered knownthat the reason was a change in system technology that was accidentally activated too early.
As soon as the service was available again, Twitter announced major changes to the content. After the controversy surrounding the blocking of a controversial newspaper article about Joe Biden, the company wants to revise its rules for dealing with content stolen by piracy. Going forward, such content would only be blocked in cases where hackers posted it directly, Twitter manager Vijaya Gadde said. in a series of tweets With. In doing so, the company also wants to take into account unintended consequences for journalists, among others.
The New York Post tabloid 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 spokesperson for Biden’s campaign team he told Politico that 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 just under three weeks before the election.
Outraged Republicans
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. Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz were outraged by the decision and announced that they would like to summon Twitter boss Jack Dorsey to the Senate.
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 instruments such as warning notices have been introduced, Twitter manager Gadde 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 the emails reached the public is also questionable. 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 owner of the repair shop before the FBI seized the computer in December 2019. The owner of the shop told CBS that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden had given him three laptops in April of 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.
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.
FCC wants to implement Trump’s request for regulation
The head of the telecommunications regulator FCC, Ajit Pai, announced on Thursday that his authority wanted to clarify a rule that has been in force since the 1990s and regulates the handling of content on online platforms. The provisions of Section 230 are sometimes interpreted too broadly, offering Internet businesses too broad protection.
According to Section 230, in simple terms, online services are not responsible for content posted by users. At the same time, it gives them broad freedom to act against certain content or users with a kind of home law. Regulation has significantly shaped today’s web. Trump accuses Facebook and Twitter of suppressing conservative views and calls for the abolition of Section 230.
According to the democratic commissioners of the FCC, among others, the authority does not have any power to regulate the networks in this regard.
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