Facebook And Twitter Limit Sharing 'New York Post' Story About Joe Biden

Facebook and Twitter took action on Wednesday to limit the distribution of New York Post reporting with unconfirmed claims about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, leading President Trump's campaign and allies to charge the companies with censorship.

Both social media companies said the moves were aimed at slowing the spread of potentially false information. But they gave few details about how they reached their decisions, sparking criticism about the lack of clarity and consistency with which they apply their rules.

The New York Post published a series of stories on Wednesday citing emails, purportedly sent by Biden's son Hunter, that the news outlet says it got from Trump's private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Facebook was limiting distribution of the Post's main story while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims, spokesman Andy Stone said. That means the platform's algorithms won't place posts linking to the story as highly in people's news feeds, reducing the number of users who see it. However, the story has still been liked, shared or commented on almost 600,000 times on Facebook, according to data from CrowdTangle, a research tool owned by the social network.

Stone said Facebook sometimes takes this step if it sees "signals" that something gaining traction is false, to give fact-checkers time to evaluate the story before it spreads widely. He did not give more detail on what signals Facebook uses or how often it takes this approach.

Twitter went further. It is blocking users from posting pictures of the emails or links to two of the New York Post's stories referring to them, spokesman Trenton Kennedy said, citing its rules against sharing "content obtained through hacking that contains private information."