Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning, and right from the beginning of the hearing they faced pressure over the censorship of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
Twitter blocked the sharing of an article about a laptop and emails said to belong to Hunter Biden, then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, and Facebook had limited the distribution of the article, but did not block it entirely. Republican lawmakers sought to strip the social media companies of legal protection they enjoy because they are not considered publishers under the law.
“That to me seems like you’re the ultimate editor,” committee chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said during his opening statement. “The editorial decision by the New York Post to run the story was overridden by Twitter and Facebook in different fashions to prevent its dissemination. Now if that’s not making an editorial decision I don’t know what would be.”
Dorsey addressed the controversy in his opening remarks, explaining as he had during a previous hearing that the Post story was blocked pursuant to a 2018 policy against spreading hacked materials.
“We made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread,” Dorsey testified. “Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”- READ MORE
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