While discussing first amendment rights on his HBO show The Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill Maher said he believed Twitter had already ‘failed’ in its new Elon Musk-driven mission to support free speech when it previously banned The New York Post for writing about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“The argument to me is, has Twitter failed in setting themself up in the past as the judge of what can go out there? And I would say yes, you have,” the political comedian said. “You failed when you threw the New York Post off of Twitter for talking about Hunter Biden’s emails. And it turned out that was a real story. You failed when you said we couldn’t read about whether COVID had come from a lab. You failed!”
Maher’s criticism was made in relation to a Post article from 2020 that included e-mails from Hunter Biden’s laptop confirming his then Vice President father Joe Biden was introduced to a Ukrainian energy businessman by his son while the latter was serving on the board. After the report went live in Oct. 2020, Twitter baselessly accused the paper of using hacked information and banned the outlet from its platform for over two weeks. In November 2020, then CEO Jack Dorsey said Twitter was wrong to censor them.
“We recognize it as a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately,” Dorsey said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which he and Mark Zuckerberg were questioned by Congress over their companies’ seemingly anti-conservative bias.
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey said to congress.
Check out Bill Maher’s full sitdown with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and former Senator Doug Jones up top.
