Twitter’s ‘Living’ Censorship The social-media firm finally unfreezes the New York Post after its story on Hunter Biden’s laptop files.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitters-living-censorship-11604263210?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
When social-media companies sanction political speech they don’t like, they always point to one policy or another that was supposedly violated. The truth is they are often making up the rules as they go.
Twitter admitted as much Friday when it finally agreed to unlock the New York Post’s account after freezing it on Oct. 14 as punishment for reporting on Hunter Biden’s business dealings that were exposed on his abandoned laptop computer.
“Our policies are living documents,” the company said in explaining its decision to stop blocking the newspaper. Initially, Twitter said the Post’s Biden story violated a policy against “content obtained without authorization.” That was absurd, as leaks of one kind or another are ubiquitous in modern political reporting.
Once that rationale collapsed, Twitter said it “decided to make changes to the policy,” and stopped preventing users from sharing the Post story. But it maintained that the story still violated the policy in effect at the time the Post tweeted it, so the newspaper’s account would remain locked until the offending tweets were deleted.
CEO Jack Dorsey struggled to explain Twitter’s incoherent position in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee. Two days later the company announced another legalistic change. “Decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change.” Got it?
The bottom line is that Twitter’s censors buckled under public scrutiny and the Post can tweet again. That’s good news for independent journalism, even if most of the press won’t recognize it. Congratulations to the Post, our sister publication under News Corp ownership, whose editors were slandered by the lords of the progressive press corps for reporting news that others ignored. The Post refused to bend to Twitter’s arbitrary demands to delete its offending tweets and prevailed.
But the whole embarrassing episode undermines the notion that Twitter is enforcing consistent policies as opposed to trying to control American political debate on the fly. Big Tech companies should either step back from political activism, or else be open about what they are doing. Twitter’s “living” censorship policy seems to reflect whatever progressives can get away with at a given time.
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