Twitter’s crackdown on the New York Post Hunter laptop story has “nearly doubled” the story’s visibility, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“When Twitter banned, and then unbanned, links to a questionably-sourced New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, its stated intention was to prevent people from spreading harmful false material as America heads into the final stretch of the election campaign,” MIT’s Technology Review reported Monday. “But thanks to the cycle of misinformation—and claims from conservatives that social-media platforms are deliberately censoring their views—Twitter managed to do the opposite of what it intended.”
DOUBLED
“In fact, Twitter’s efforts triggered a massive spike in interest in the story. “According to Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm, shares of the Post article ‘nearly doubled’ after Twitter started suppressing it,” MIT noted.
It’s called the “Streisand Effect” — a “social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet,” according to Wikipedia.
The name comes from singer Barbra Streisand’s efforts, in 2003, to suppress a photo of her Malibu, California, home. She was worried about security.
According to Zignal Labs, the effect was immediate and significant.
“Zignal found a surge of shares immediately after Twitter instituted the block, jumping from about 5.5 thousand shares every 15 minutes to about 10 thousand. This doesn’t necessarily mean the block caused the explosion in interest, but the surge corresponds with a series of widely shared tweets from Trump supporters and conservatives accusing the platform of political censorship,” MIT noted Monday.
“The New York Post story, which was blocked on Twitter for about a day, was shared 352,200 times on the platform,” they added.
Twitter said the NY Post story cited its policy against unverified information and “hacked materials.” However, they don’t back that up with evidence.
Twitter reversed its policy after a hue and cry.
CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that “[s]traight blocking of URLs was wrong, 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.”
However, Twitter still has the NY Post Twitter page locked because they won’t delete the Hunter Biden laptop stories. That’s tech tyranny and it’s causing problems for Twitter.
TWITTER’S IN TROUBLE
Congress has launched a full investigation.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) want to subpoena Twitter officials, including Dorsey.
The Republican National Committee also filed a Federal Election Commission claim against the platform Friday. They claim that Twitter’s efforts to suppress the story “amounts to an illegal corporate in-kind political contribution to the Biden campaign.”
The FCC is also looking into Twitter.
There are demands to limit or eliminate Section 230 that protects social media from lawsuits.
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