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MIT: Twitter Ban ‘Nearly Doubled’ The Visibility Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Emily Zanotti
MIT: Twitter Ban ‘Nearly Doubled’ The Visibility Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Twitter’s crackdown on a controversial New York Post story that “purported to show new emails from Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, about his business dealings while Joe Biden was the vice president in the Obama administration,” “nearly doubled” the story’s visibility and triggered the so-called “Streisand Effect,” amplifying the Post’s claims, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a high-profile media intelligence firm.

“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.”

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