Is social media censoring speech or combating disinformation?

What should companies like Facebook and Twitter be able to publish?

Jack Dorsey.
(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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Facebook and Twitter "spent years preparing to face" the kind of controversy that came with the New York Post's publication of emails allegedly taken from the computer of Joe Biden's son Hunter, said Robert McMillan at The Wall Street Journal. They still ended up with a mess. Twitter, which initially blocked users from sharing the article (and even froze the Post's official account), did "an about-face" after an outcry from Republicans and said it would change its ban on hacked content "unless it's directly shared by hackers." Meanwhile inside Facebook, "executives had performed role-playing exercises about how to respond to an email dump." Following the playbook they developed, Facebook flagged the Post's articles for fact-checking and limited their exposure in news feeds. That didn't shield Facebook from widespread criticism: Republicans lawmakers complained of censorship, even as the Post's articles stayed at the top of the most-shared charts.

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