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In Blocking Tweets, Is Twitter Protecting the Election or Interfering?

Michelle Quinn

   The decision by Twitter to block the dissemination of a story on its
   site about Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden,
   has added to an already heated discussion in the U.S. about whether
   internet companies have too much power and are making decisions that
   could affect the U.S. elections.

   Some have applauded Twitter's move as a stand against misinformation.
   Others have criticized Twitter's decision as biased, curtailing speech
   in a way that could affect the outcome of the U.S. election.

   In recent weeks, Twitter, Facebook and Google, the owner of YouTube,
   have increasingly taken steps to restrict the spread of what they
   describe as misinformation and extremist speech on their sites. After
   the 2016 U.S. election, internet companies were criticized for not
   doing enough to stop misinformation on their services.

   This week, Twitter blocked certain accounts on its site as they tried
   to share a story by the New York Post that cited supposed email
   exchanges between Hunter Biden and a Ukrainian official about setting
   up a meeting with Hunter Biden's father when Joe Biden was the U.S.
   vice president. The story claimed to rely on records from a computer
   drive that was allegedly abandoned by Hunter Biden. Rudy Giuliani,
   lawyer to President Donald Trump, reportedly gave the drive to the
   Post.

   No meeting, campaign says

   The Biden campaign said it had "reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules
   from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever
   took place."

   "Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two
   Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not
   legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same
   conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward
   Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," said Andrew Bates, a spokesman
   for Biden.

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