After a massive backlash for blocking the NYPost story linking to Joe Biden’s son’s controversial linkage to the Ukrainian government, Twitter made some policy changes for hacked materials.
Social media platforms have been struggling to maintain equilibrium when it comes to allowing political content and posts of users. On Thursday, October 15, Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) also announced new major policy changes for its hacked materials. This decision comes soon after the controversial decision from Twitter of blocking the NYPost story about Joe Biden’s son.
The New York Post story shows that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden introduced his father to a top executive of the Ukrainian company whom he worked for. Twitter removed all posts of this story from its platform saying it violated its hacked material policy. This controversial decision caused massive outrage on Twitter especially when U.S. Presidential Elections are round the corner.
Twitter defended its position of banning links to the article saying the story contained images of hacked material. Besides, it also noted that the story had private and personal information that the social media platform refuses to share. Twitter stated that after receiving “significant feedback” it has made a few changes to its hacked material policy.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter lead for legal, policy and trust introduced two major amendments. The first is that Twitter will only remove the hacked content when directly shared by hackers or those acting in favor of them. The other is that Twitter will label tweets and offer context instead of directly instead of blocking them from being shared on their platform.
So, what’s changing?
1. We will no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them
2. We will label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter
— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 16, 2020
To this, Gadda added: “All the other Twitter Rules will still apply to the posting of or linking to hacked materials, such as our rules against posting private information, synthetic and manipulated media, and non-consensual nudity”.
NYPost Story Still Violates Twitter Rules
Despite tweaking its hacked materials policy, users won’t be able to share the NYPost story link to Joe Biden’s son. This is because the post still contains private information like email addresses and phone numbers. Thus, the post still violates the platform rules as confirmed by other Twitter executives.
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have always remained at the center of political controversies. After the massive backlash, Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) shares before starting to recover back.
Besides, on Thursday, Twitter also faced another massive outage. At 5:30 PM eastern tie, Twitter users were unable to post any new tweets or even see them. However, things were reportedly restored by 7 PM. Twitter said that it will continue to monitor the issue.
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