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Sloppy methodology: social media, censorship and New York Post’s Hunter Biden story

By Binoy Kampmark - posted Tuesday, 20 October 2020


The decision by Twitter and Facebook regarding the New York Post article recklessly adds fuel to GOP claims. While it was being celebrated by Kevin Roose in The New York Times as an indication that Facebook and Twitter were "finally starting to clean up their messes," there was little by way of elucidation. Cristina Tardáguila of the International Fact-Checking Network had a few questions for Facebook. What was their methodology in such cases? "How do they identify what needs to be less distributed?" Could such decisions ever eschew partisanship?

Twitter's decisions had not been well-argued or well-reasoned. The Post episode moved chief executive Jack Dorsey to an admission. "Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM [direct message] with zero context as to why we're blocking: unacceptable."

The storm duly caused a change of heart. The high priests of social media went about their business of tinkering and readjusting content policies. "Straight blocking of URLs was wrong," Dorsey reiterated, "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."

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Vijaya Gadde, speaking for the Twitter collective as the company's global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety, claimed "that labelling Tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the public interest and public conversation. The Hacked Material Policy is being updated to reflect these new enforcement rules."

According to Gadde, Twitter would no longer remove hacked content except the sort "directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them". Not exactly a rousing change. Tweets would also be labelled "to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter." Contextualised editorialising – of a sort.

The implications for such a decision are not small fare. Twitter's decision to limit dissemination of the article for having content supposedly hacked was a scolding gesture to the way material is obtained. In the miasmic terror of foreign interference, bias and how electoral contests might tip in favour of or against the ogre in the White House, perspectives on what can be discussed and spread have been skewed. What of purloined material that exposes state or corporate misdemeanour, the bread and butter enterprise of such groups as Anonymous? With this rationale, as Glenn Greenwald noted with characteristic seriousness, reporting on everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Panama Papers would find itself restricted, if not blocked altogether. A real boon for the censors.

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About the Author

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and blogs at Oz Moses.

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