'The Five' react to social media censorship of Hunter Biden report
Twitter, Facebook block users from sharing New York Post report about Democratic nominee's son
Twitter appears to be facing technical difficulties as users complain that their accounts are down on their computers and mobile devices.
A spokesperson at Twitter told Fox News “we’re looking into it” in what has been described as a "service disruption" in response to questions about the site being down for users on Thursday evening.
“We know people are having trouble tweeting and using Twitter. We’re working to fix this issue as quickly as possible. We’ll share more when we have it and tweet from @TwitterSupport when we can – stay tuned,“ the spokesperson elaborated. "We have no evidence of a security breach or hack, and we're currently investigating internal causes.”
It is unclear if the widespread platform malfunction has anything to do with the measures it took to suppress a report from The New York Post revealing emails that show a connection to Hunter Biden, his business contacts in Ukraine and his father former Vice President Joe Biden.
The Post obtained a 2015 email indicating that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thanked Hunter Biden for "giving an opportunity" to meet his father, then-Vice President Biden.
FACEBOOK AND TWITTER REDUCING DISTRIBUTION OF NEW YORK POST HUNTER BIDEN STORY
The Biden 2020 presidential campaign responded to the Post story on Wednesday, saying the former vice president "carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," and that: "Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath."
The current Democratic nominee has previously said he has "never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings."
Wednesday afternoon, both Twitter and Facebook began cracking down on the spreading of the article on social media.
Twitter claimed in a statement that it had taken action against the article in keeping with the company's "Hacked Materials Policy."
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"In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter," a spokesperson said. In practice, Twitter users were unable to share a link to the Post story, either on their public pages or via direct messages.
There is currently no indication that the emails obtained by the Post were hacked.
Fox News' Hillary Vaughn, Audrey Conklin, Paul Conner, and Nick Givas contributed to this report.
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