Twitter has locked White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s Twitter account for “violating our rules against distribution of hacked material.”
In the offending tweet, McEnany shared a link to the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s leaked emails, which revealed an email from a Ukrainian executive to Hunter Biden requesting the former Vice President’s son to “use his influence” on behalf of the firm that allegedly paid him a salary of $50,000 a month, in an email with the subject “urgent issue,” while Joe Biden was serving as Vice President under the Obama administration.
On Wednesday, the New York Post published leaked emails obtained from an abandoned laptop purported belonging to Hunter Biden. In addition to emails implicating Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in business dealings with the Ukrainian firm Burisma, the laptop contained numerous images of Biden’s younger son in compromising positions, including photographs of him using drug paraphernalia.
Other emails obtained by the New York Post purportedly show that the Obama administration allowed a Democratic PR company hired by Burisma to participate in a conference call about a then-upcoming visit to Ukraine by Joe Biden.
Efforts to post links some of these articles on Twitter will result in an error message stating the following:
“Your Tweet couldn’t be sent because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
Some users, like White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s, have been locked out of their accounts for sharing the links before the ban went sitewide.
Twitter’s efforts to stifle the dissemination and spread of the emails follows in line with Facebook, which censored links to the New York Post. Posting on Twitter, Facebook’s policy communications partner Andy Stone stated that the platform was “reducing its distribution on our platform” pending the assessment of fact checkers.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” he wrote.
The New York Post’s Editorial Board published a statement to condemn Facebook for committing censorship to “help Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.”
In response to the widespread censorship, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) brought up the Hunter Biden case at the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court hearing.
Hawley also tweeted extensively about the topic, calling on Facebook and Twitter to explain their actions to his office. Hawley publicly posted his office’s letter to the Federal Election Commission regarding Big Tech’s potential violation of federal election law.
Hawley was joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to explain its censorship of the New York Post.
