By banning circulation of the New York Post’s bombshell report about the role former Vice President Joe Biden played in his son’s overseas business dealings, Twitter “nearly doubled” the amount of times the story was shared, according to a media intelligence firm.
Zignal Labs reported that shares of the Post’s report skyrocketed after Twitter prevented users from sharing the article in their tweets or direct messages.
Before the ban, the story was shared about 5.5 thousand times every 15 minutes.
After the ban, the story was shared 10 thousand times every 15 minutes, the firm found, according to MIT Technology Review.
Facebook also began censoring the report, but did not prevent users from sharing it.
Rather, the social media platform slapped a “warning” label on it and announced that it would be treated as misinformation until a third-party fact checker had reviewed it.
Twitter, on the other hand, suppressed the story entirely, claiming it violated a 2018 policy prohibiting the sharing of “content obtained without authorization.”
Another Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that the story was removed because of its “lack of authoritative reporting.”
The company also suspended the Post’s account — it has not been able to tweet its own stories since October 14th.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the decision to block the story “with zero context” was a bad decision.
Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
But the platform still has not allowed the Post to regain access to its account.
Several of the publication’s employees confirmed that Twitter is trying to force the Post to delete its tweet about the Biden story.
Twitter confirmed that the Post “has been informed what is necessary to unlock their account.”
