After months of review, the Federal Election Commission determined that Twitter did not violate election laws in October by restricting access to a New York Post article alleging the president’s son, Hunter Biden, had engaged in influence-peddling via shady overseas business dealings.
The agency ruled that the social media company did not act out of political motivation but for commercial purpose and therefore did not break the law, according to a explanation of the decision acquired by The New York Times.
Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden piece triggered backlash from conservatives and Republican lawmakers, who argued that such preferential treatment of a presidential candidate’s family member by a tech titan constituted an “illegal in-kind contribution” to the campaign.
The Post story, based on email correspondence between Hunter Biden and an executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, presented incriminating evidence that the Ukrainian company may have exploited the president’s son political leverage. Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in April of 2014.
The F.E.C. said Twitter had “credibly explained” that the reason behind its inhibiting the article from being linked and shared was to comply with its own “hacked materials” policy, which prohibited uploading content “obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.” Trump cronies had originally secured the email chain to expose the Biden family’s problematic involvements in Ukraine.
Two weeks after the story broke on October 30th, Twitter unlocked the Post’s account. CEO Jack Dorsey recognized in October that blocking links “with zero context as to why” had been “unacceptable.” The company then promised to revise its hacked materials policy and permit articles like the Post’s to be distributed with accompanying labels providing more context.
At a House hearing on the matter in March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted his company’s decision to suppress the story was a “mistake,” but one that was not necessarily malicious in intent.
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them [the Post] in any particular way,” Dorsey told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in comments reported by the Post.
Twitter’s head of site integrity reportedly had been notified by federal law enforcement early in the 2020 election cycle to anticipate the disclosure of materials by “malign state actors” designed to target political campaigns and those associated with them, including Hunter Biden, the F.E.C. documents showed.
The F.E.C. concluded there was “no information that Twitter coordinated” with the Biden campaign to give it an unfair press advantage by limiting viewing of the Post article through its platform.
Source: National Review
