[Thread] Twitter clarifies why it blocked the sharing of NY Post's Biden story, saying it contained private info and violated its Hacked Materials Policy
We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we've taken with respect to two NY Post articles that were first Tweeted this morning.
@twittersafety
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's safety account moved within hours of the NY Post story going viral, citing private information and its Hacked Materials Policy — but the block immediately became the story itself. Within days Twitter reversed course on sharing the NY Post link, arguing the information had spread so widely it could no longer be considered private.
First-order effects
The clarification puts a named policy — Hacked Materials — behind the enforcement action, but also hands critics a specific rule to attack, since the same policy is now applied to material whose provenance was never established as hacked.
Second-order effects
Facing sustained pressure, Twitter rewrites the policy itself: per the updated Hacked Materials Policy, it will no longer remove content unless shared by the hackers directly and will label tweets rather than block links — converting an outright ban into a friction mechanism.
Third-order effects
As Stratechery's analysis of the episode argues, the block damaged Twitter's standing as a neutral facilitator of information sharing, pointing toward a structural tension: platform moderation decisions on politically charged content now carry reputational and regulatory consequences that push platforms toward lighter-touch tools like labels over removals.
The trend: Platform content moderation is shifting from hard blocks toward labels and narrowed policies when enforcement itself triggers backlash, with the hacked-materials debate as a defining case.
Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it'd mean that some of history's most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks' war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. ht…
Explaining contentious moderation decisions needs to be done at the time the moderation occurs. I imagine there's a lot of learning going on at Twitter and Facebook tonight about how they tackle this stuff as it no doubt escalates over the next couple of weeks 😬 https://twitter.c…
Twitter is now claiming it was the images in the NY Post article that raised alarm bells, which strikes me as a completely ex post facto justification https://twitter.com/...
.@Twitter @jack this is not nearly good enough. In fact, it's a joke. It's downright insulting. I will ask you - and @Facebook - to give an explanation UNDER OATH to the Senate subcommittee I chair. These are potential violations of election law, and that's a crime https://twitte…
I think this still runs into difficult situations (see @jacklgoldsmith's work on the “wikileaks-ization” of the press), but it draws a line that's a lot clearer than we initially knew https://twitter.com/...
Here are 2 pieces on the problem. https://www.lawfareblog.com/ ... & https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ .... Under this policy Twitter would ban stories re hacked Sony emails, the Panama Papers, the hacked NSA and CIA offensive cyber tools, probably Snowden's documents and Chels…
Incredibly dumb of @Twitter at multiple levels. This will only: 1. Make ordinary people mistrust the platform and hurt Twitter's already tarnished brand. 2. Get more people to read the @nypost story they're trying to stop people from sharing. https://twitter.com/...
Still blocking because “spammy” or “unsafe” This is election interference & an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...