Science & Technology
Twitter’s Orwellian Ban On Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal Nearly Doubles Its Reach, Reports MIT
The poorly-thought-through ban triggered the so-called Streisand Effect.
In a prime example of the Streisand effect, Twitter nearly doubled the reach of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scandal when it went full 1984 and censored the story, reports the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT Technology Review reports:
According to Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm, shares of the Post article “nearly doubled” after Twitter started suppressing it. The poorly-thought-through ban triggered the so-called Streisand Effect and helped turn a sketchy article into a must-share blockbuster. And then on Friday, the Republican National Committee filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against Twitter, claiming that the ban “amounts to an illegal corporate in-kind political contribution to the Biden campaign.”
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Looking at the firehose of Twitter shares of the URL—including original tweets, retweets, and quote tweets—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.
Twitter cited its policy against “hacked material” when it explained why it was censoring the story.
What wasn’t explained, however, was how the material published by the New York Post was hacked.
According to the Post, the published information was obtained from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden that was dropped off at a computer repair shop where it was never retrieved. Its hard drive’s material would eventually be handed over to the FBI and later to President Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, by the owner of the shop.
The social media company went as far as preventing the spread of the story through direct messaging on its platform and outright suspending accounts for sharing the information.