Twitter backed down Friday in its battle with The Post and unlocked its main account after a two-week stalemate over the Hunter Biden exposé.
The move came after The Post refused Twitter’s demand that it delete six tweets that linked to stories that the company claimed — without any evidence — were based on hacked information.
The Post never budged, and kept the tweets on the account during the standoff — even as Twitter obscured them from view.
In a series of tweets, the social-media giant said it was revising its “Hacked Materials Policy” and “updating our practice of not retroactively overturning prior enforcement.”
“Our policies are living documents,” said one of the tweets from @TwitterSafety.
“We’re willing to update and adjust them when we encounter new scenarios or receive important feedback from the public.”
Twitter arbitrarily cracked down on The Post and locked its account on Oct. 14.
The company claimed The Post violated its policy on sharing “hacked materials” by tweeting links to bombshell exclusives on Biden’s emails — without ever saying how it came to that conclusion and despite the fact that neither Hunter Biden or anyone else has claimed his emails were hacked.
The move sparked widespread outrage that led Twitter to revise its policy so other users could tweet the stories.
But it continued to hold The Post’s account hostage — demanding the six tweets about its own reporting be deleted. They never were.
“While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively. You will still need to delete the Tweets to regain access to your account,” a Twitter representative told The Post on Oct. 16.
Twitter also made the six tweets at issue invisible to users by replacing them with messages saying, “This Tweet is no longer available.”
On Friday, the company said that under its latest policy revision, “Decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change.”
“We believe this is fair and appropriate,” Twitter said.
“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.”
The Post gained about 190,000 followers while it was locked out of it’s account, a 10.6 percent increase in just about two weeks.
A tweet announcing The Post’s return to the social media site on Friday evening quickly went viral, racking up more than 17,000 retweets and close to 50,000 likes in about an hour.
The missive included an image of The Post’s Saturday front page, with the headline “Free bird!”
“We’re baaaaaaack,” the tweet read.
source NY Post