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Twitter is no longer restricting the New York Post's account

The social media platform says it'll retroactively apply its changed policy on hacked materials.

Corinne Reichert Senior Editor
Corinne Reichert (she/her) grew up in Sydney, Australia and moved to California in 2019. She holds degrees in law and communications, and currently writes news, analysis and features for CNET across the topics of electric vehicles, broadband networks, mobile devices, big tech, artificial intelligence, home technology and entertainment. In her spare time, she watches soccer games and F1 races, and goes to Disneyland as often as possible.
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Corinne Reichert
2 min read
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Twitter has backed down, allowing the New York Post to tweet again.

Angela Lang/CNET

Twitter has reversed course on its decision to lock the New York Post account, saying Friday that it's allowing the publication to tweet again. The change in stance comes after Twitter  altered its Hacked Materials Policy, which is the policy that initially led the company to restrict the New York Post account.

The social media platform retroactively applied the changed policy to the newspaper's account, Twitter said in a tweet.

"This means that because a specific @nypost enforcement led us to update the Hacked Materials Policy, we will no longer restrict their account under the terms of the previous policy and they can now tweet again," Twitter said. The company called its policies "living documents" that are updated based on feedback and new situations.

"We're baaaaaaack," NY Post tweeted, alongside an image of a newspaper front page with a blue Twitter bird flying out of a cage.

Read more: Facebook, Twitter are fighting fake news. Why you still need to be careful

Twitter came under fire two weeks ago for limiting the reach of the New York Post article on Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden because the social media company said the report was based on hacked materials. Soon after, Twitter backtracked and stopped removing posts linking to hacked materials, unless they were being shared by the hackers or those working with them. Twitter also said it'll label tweets to provide context, rather than blocking them.

The Post's story was based on emails purportedly obtained from a laptop Hunter Biden left in a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019.

An article from the Post on Friday alleged that Twitter "arbitrarily cracked down" on the publication over the Biden story. The Post said it refused to delete its six tweets about the story.