WASHINGTON – Today during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing regarding censorship and suppression on social media during the 2020 election, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) questioned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about the role his platform played in suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Excerpts of the exchange are below, and video can be found here.
CORNYN: “Mr. Dorsey, when Twitter decided to take down the story, the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, did you do that under your terms of service or did you do it under some other claim of authority?”
DORSEY: “We did it under our terms of service which, as you know, everyone agrees to when they sign up for Twitter, and this is a policy around distribution of hacked materials. We did not want Twitter to be a distribution point for hacked materials.”
CORNYN: “Well, you do realize that by taking down that story you probably gave it more prominence and more visibility than it ever would have gotten had you left it alone.”
DORSEY: “We realize that and we recognize it as a mistake that we made both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately.”