The New York Post has been locked out of its Twitter account for a week after it began publishing and sharing stories about materials from a laptop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The milestone, and each of the past several days, has been marked by deputy politics editor Emma-Jo Morris. Morris was one of the two journalists with a byline on the two stories about a laptop and hard drive that apparently possessed emails, photos, and other information that shed light on the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings, drug use, and more that were subject to a social media crackdown.
“7 days have passed since the Post published the first story in our Hunter Biden laptop exposé,” Morris tweeted on Wednesday. “We still cannot access @nypost Twitter account, despite @jack’s apology.”
7 days have passed since the Post published the first story in our Hunter Biden laptop exposé. We still cannot access @nypost Twitter account, despite @jack‘s apology.
— Emma-Jo Morris (@EmmaJoNYC) October 21, 2020
When asked on Wednesday, Twitter declined to comment or provide updates on the status of the New York Post’s account. As of Wednesday afternoon, the last tweet sent by the New York Post was on Oct. 14 at 2:16 p.m. Election Day, when the elder Biden is set to face off against President Trump, is less than two weeks away.
Twitter, along with Facebook, drew outrage after they took steps to stop the spread of the Hunter Biden stories, going as far as disabling the ability to share the articles.
A Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner last week that the company was no longer censoring tweets that contain the story, as the information that was once of concern is now widely available in the press and on other digital platforms. However, it is not retroactively changing its enforcement decisions and is requiring the outlet to delete old tweets containing the story that it said were in violation of its policies.
The New York Post did not answer multiple requests for comment.
“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,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on the evening of Oct. 14.
The company later announced that it would be making two changes to its hacked and leaked materials policies.
The materials linked to Hunter Biden come from a laptop and hard drive that were left at a computer shop in Delaware but never retrieved by the owner. Although Joe Biden has dubbed the ensuing stories to be part of a “smear campaign,” neither he nor his son has denied the authenticity of the hardware’s contents.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials have said the laptop story could have ties to a Russia disinformation campaign, but Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, the Justice Department, and the FBI, which has possession of the laptop, don’t believe that is the case.
