CEO Jack Dorsey admits that Twitter made “a mistake” in censoring The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. It’s a start.
“We recognize it as a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately,” Dorsey confessed at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
But he was still playing games, saying the move was “corrected” within “24 hours” — when Twitter actually kept The Post’s account locked for two full weeks.
Twitter demanded The Post delete its initial tweets on our Hunter Biden reporting before it would unlock the account, even after letting everyone else on Twitter share those stories. The company finally gave in after we refused to bend the knee.
Earlier, it cited its policy against spreading hacked materials as leading to the ban. Yet The Post had reported that Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop, which gained legal control of it when he didn’t return for it. Biden never claimed he’d been hacked, nor ever denied the veracity of the e-mails.
“We made a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking,” Dorsey claimed Tuesday. Huh?
“We are not a publisher,” he told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as Twitter only allows others to distribute “information.” Asked what he thought a publisher is, Dorsey said: “An entity that is publishing under editorial guidelines and decision.” Like censorship decisions?
As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) noted, Twitter also suspended Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan for his tweet trumpeting the success of the southern border wall just days before the election. “That was a mistake. We reverted it,” Dorsey said, pleading “heightened awareness around government accounts during this time.”
As Lee wryly noted, mistakes happen “almost entirely on one side of the political aisle rather than the other.”
The first step to fixing a problem is admitting it exists. Maybe Dorsey is almost there.