Twitter, the Post and a free press

We don’t want to make it a habit of defending our crosstown rivals at the New York Post, but just as the paper’s reporters (and readers) are being wronged now by the continued petty boycott by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie over his displeasure at an editorial, Twitter was wrong to block tweets of the Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s mystery laptop in October 2020. We said it at the time, and now the ex-Twitter employees who imposed the blockade so admit in congressional testimony.

The First Amendment insists that government isn’t allowed to interfere with the Post’s freedom to publish any nonsense they want (which they often do), but Twitter’s stupid move wasn’t any infringement of the Bill of Rights. In 2020, Twitter was a publicly traded corporation, which made its own private business decision to block tweets of the Post’s Hunter Biden story. And then Twitter relented after a day.

It was a very bad call by Twitter, which led to conspiracy theories displayed yesterday by suspicious Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that the FBI was behind the blocking of tweets about the laptop story. Even though Donald Trump was president at the time, the Deep State FBI was secretly opposed to him and got Twitter to quash the Post’s scoop in order to shield the Bidens. And it goes further, that if Twitter hadn’t mucked around for those 24 hours, somehow Trump would have beaten Hunter’s dad Joe in the election. Of course, goes the warped thinking of too many of those GOPers, Trump did beat Biden, but the election was stolen.

We got lost in that muddled maze, but it still doesn’t excuse Twitter’s blunder.

And now being privately held by Elon Musk, who several of the Republicans praised at the hearing, Twitter can make more bad decisions, as it did yesterday in imposing confusing limits on who can tweet how much and how often. Musk can do as he pleases with his $44 billion possession. He’d be wise to not block the press.