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Twitter finally reverses course, allows the NY Post to tweet again

As the NY Post put it: “We’re baaaaaack”

Twitter backed down Friday in its battle with The Post and unlocked its main account after a two-week stalemate over the Hunter Biden exposé.

The move came after The Post refused Twitter’s demand that it delete six tweets that linked to stories that the company claimed — without any evidence — were based on hacked information.

The Post never budged, and kept the tweets on the account during the standoff — even as Twitter obscured them from view…

“While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively. You will still need to delete the Tweets to regain access to your account,” a Twitter representative told The Post on Oct. 16.

From the moment the NY Post published the Hunter Biden story on Oct 14, Twitter clamped down completely on their account and prevented anyone from tweeting the story. At the time, the main excuse was that the site’s “hacked materials policy” mandated the crackdown. What Twitter couldn’t explain at the time, or indeed ever, was what evidence they had to suggest the material was hacked.

The Biden campaign cynically used Twitter’s decision to block the story as evidence it was false. Meanwhile, fact-checkers were criticizing Twitter for its vague and shifting explanation of its own policy. After this complete disaster unfolded, Twitter’s CEO announced a change to the hacked materials policy on the 16th but, as Ed wrote this morning, Twitter would only unlock the account if the Post would delete the emails which initially caused them to be locked. Given that the policy that had caused the account to be locked had been declared a mistake by CEO Jack Dorsey and changed, why should the Post need to delete the tweets to regain its account?

This morning CNN’s Jake Tapper suggested the paper could just delete the tweets and then tweet the same thing again:

That might have worked but it also would have communicated that the Post was willing to legitimize in some small way what Twitter had done to them. Honestly, I’m sure both the NY Post and Twitter felt it would be better if the other side would blink first, but Twitter had no legs to stand on. So today, Twitter finally admitted as much and once again announced a policy update. BTW, was this first tweet meant to be a veiled shot at originalism?

Not only was their policy a PR disaster for them, it provided a big boost for the Hunter Biden story and even for the Post’s Twitter account:

The Post gained about 190,000 followers while it was locked out of it’s account, a 10.6 percent increase in just about two weeks.

A tweet announcing The Post’s return to the social media site on Friday evening quickly went viral, racking up more than 17,000 retweets and close to 50,000 likes in about an hour.

It’s pretty clear that Twitter tried to deep-six this story so the fact that they reserved this retraction for a Friday night news dump is a pretty humiliating admission that their effort backfired in a big way.

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