Twitter's blocking of NY Post's story undermined its role as a facilitator for info sharing, while Facebook slowing the spread of the story was reasonable
StratecheryBen Thompson
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc runs over four days: Twitter first cited private information and its Hacked Materials Policy to justify the block in a public policy clarification, Platformer argued both platforms deserved credit for rapid restriction, and then Stratechery split the two responses — arguing tech was being unfairly blamed for the media's 2016 mistakes and that Twitter's hard block crossed from moderation into undermining its core function as an information-sharing facilitator.
What makes the critique land is Twitter's own behavior: by October 18 it had unblocked the link, reasoning that the information had spread so widely it could no longer be considered private. Facebook took the narrower path, limiting distribution pending a fact-check rather than blocking outright — the contrast Stratechery treats as the reasonable baseline.
First-order effects
Twitter's reversal within days of the block effectively concedes the point: a policy enforced on day one was unenforceable by day three once virality redefined the material as public, leaving the platform's stated rule looking weaker than no rule at all.
Facebook's reduce-velocity-instead-of-remove approach kept the NY Post story reachable while blunting its spread, giving it a defensible position that Twitter's outright block never had.
Second-order effects
Publishers like the NY Post gain a ready-made grievance narrative — moderation decisions on their stories are now framed as censorship rather than safety, raising the political cost of every future blocking call.
The divergent handling puts pressure on both companies to pre-announce and codify rules for leaked-material stories, because ad-hoc judgment calls that reverse within a news cycle invite exactly this criticism.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, hack-and-leak moderation migrates from improvised decisions toward written policies applied at speed — but each visible reversal erodes the enforcement credibility those policies need to work.
The deeper tension Stratechery names — platforms as neutral facilitators versus active gatekeepers — becomes a recurring fault line for regulators and politicians weighing whether moderation power should sit with company policy teams at all.
The trend: Moderation of explosive political stories is shifting from ad-hoc blocking toward codified leak-related policies, whose credibility gets tested publicly within days of enforcement.
Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability Twitter went too far last week for reasons that go back to 2016 and the unfair blaming of tech for media's mistakes. https://stratechery.com/...
@girdley You probably need to read the whole article for context. The “evidenced by 2016” is what he's saying is a false narrative. The media blames FB for 2016 but there really isn't a ton of evidence that that assertation is actually true. https://stratechery.com/...
This is a great piece, but it's tragically naive about a critical player in the information ecosystem. “Bad stories” like the Hunter Biden one don't just appear out of nowhere, they are fabricated by adversarial nation states with immense expertise and resources. https://twitter.…
Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability https://stratechery.com/... Ben Thompson makes the rather convincing claim that the NYT had a bigger impact on Clinton not being elected over “her emails” than did Facebook.
No matter how problematic I think that Facebook is, @benthompson has a sophisticated and reasonable point here: https://stratechery.com/... What matters is agenda-setting; the weight and salience that a story is given. Assigning such values are primarily functions of the MASS med…
@mathewi except that someone needed to make a decision, 3 weeks before the election. So if lawmakers aren't willing to make decisions about what should, and should not, be allowed online, it means private companies have been outsourced that role.
The important difference between the ways in which Facebook and Twitter reacted to the New York Post Hunter Biden story: Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability - Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/...
@benthompson gen agree but qq, if TWTR said “truthfulness” is part of ToS (generally, or for verified news outlets), should they over time take measures to penalize news outlets (or accounts) that push bad info? Or is this too hard or inappropriate? Does TWTR have Page Rank? http…
So illuminating and smart. “The entire debacle is what happens when two broken systems — information distribution and American politics — collide.” https://twitter.com/...
“Republican suspicion of tech [is] rooted not in traditional economic arguments about antitrust, but rather in political concerns about a traditionally Democratic industry controlling communications.” @benthompson gets it exactly right. https://stratechery.com/...
Lots of good points here 1. Impact of media like Fox News & NYT bigger than memes on social media during elections but never discussed. 2. Censorship is the only solution to stopping all misinformation on social media but who decides what's misinfo? https://stratechery.com/...
Ben Thompson says it was “absolutely outrageous that a communications platform unilaterally decided what was or was not true, outright barring a major publication from accessing its services, even if the story was false” https://stratechery.com/...
“spread is what Facebook has agency over, not necessarily the story itself. This is also why Facebook's banning of Qanon is acceptable in a way Twitter's link ban was not: the former happens on Facebook, and is thus Facebook's responsibility.” https://stratechery.com/...
Incredible stuff from @katie_robertson inside the New York Post's newsroom as the bosses rammed a story through on Rudy's sayso, and over reporters' objections https://www.nytimes.com/...
New York Post pushed the Hunter Biden piece amid newsroom doubts. Some reporters withheld their bylines and questioned the credibility the article. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing. https://www.nytimes.com/...