Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that blocking a story about US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in the lead-up to the 2020 US Presidential election was a “total mistake”.
Dorsey made the remarks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, which also included the CEOs of big tech and social media giants Facebook and Alphabet. Facebook too had moved to limit the story on its site.
The New York Post story had unearthed shocking emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, showing that he had introduced his father then Vice President Joe Biden, to a Ukrainian energy executive at Burisma Holdings Ltd. — a move that led then US President Donald Trump’s campaign to accuse the company of “interfering” in the election.
The emails are only a part of the data recovered from a laptop that was reportedly dropped of at a repair shop in 2019. The laptop was later seized by the FBI. Among the data recovered are pictures of Hunter Biden and a video that appears to show him smoking crack while engaged in a sex act.
Twitter also locked The New York Post out of its account for more than two weeks over charges that the exposé used hacked information — a decision Dorsey chalked up to a “process error.”
Dorsey questioned on “anti-conservative bias” on Twitter
House Republican Whip Steve Scalise grilled Dorsey about concerns of an “anti-conservative bias” on Twitter.
“We made a total mistake with the New York Post, we corrected that within 24 hours,” Mr Dorsey said. “It was not to do with the content, it was to do with the hacked materials policy. We had an incorrect interpretation.”
“We don’t write policy according to any particular political leaning”, Dorsey added.
The Twitter CEO was also asked about the New York Post’s account being blocked and being unable to tweet.
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
When Scalise asked if anyone from the “censoring department” was held accountable for the mistake, Dorsey dodged the question. “We don’t have a censoring department”, Dorsey said.
He was then asked who made the decision to block the New York Post’s account.
“We didn’t block their account for two weeks, we required them to delete the tweet and then they could tweet it again,” Dorsey replied. “They didn’t take that action, so we corrected it for them.”
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