Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey speaks out: “Straight Blocking Of URLs” Was Wrong

By now, most Americans are angry with the two most popular social sites in the world: Facebook and Twitter. It all started after the two platforms censored sourced reporting from the New York Post’s story about bombshell emails and videos obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

However, the censorship did nothing to stop the story from going viral online. Millions of Americans called their elected leaders to take action and reign down on the two tech giants.  The story quickly got the attention of U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. In a Twitter post, Sen. Hawley said: “@Facebook I want to know on what grounds you are actively censoring a news report about potentially illegal corruption by the Democrat candidate for president. If you have evidence this is “disinformation,” disclose it immediately. Expect a formal inquiry from my office.”

Then a couple of hours later, Twitter took censorship to a new level by blocking access to U.S. government websites, warning users they are malicious and unsafe.

About three hours of social backlash, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized after U.S. Presiden Trump threatened to remove Facebook and Twitter protections and called them ‘terrible’ for blocking the New York Post story. President Trump is called for an end to Section 230 immunity that protects sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others.

In a tweet, Dorsey said the following:

“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”

Yesterday night, Twitter went into damage control mode and reversed course on the New York Post story. In a series of tweets, Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead, said the company has decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it.

“Over the last 24 hours, we’ve received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it,” Gadde wrote.

Then this morning, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey speaks out saying that “straight blocking of URLs” was wrong.

“Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that.”

Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that. https://t.co/ZLUw3YD887

— jack (@jack) October 16, 2020