What happened when Twitter and Facebook limited a Burisma story
A look back at the platform restrictions that followed a New York Post report on Hunter Biden and a Ukrainian gas company.
What happened on 15 October 2020, one day after the New York Post published a story linking Hunter Biden to Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings? On that date Twitter locked the account of President Donald Trump's presidential campaign, saying it had shared private information without that person's permission. The material related to a controversial Hunter Biden video. The account was later unlocked.
The report of 14 October
The Post reported on 14 October 2020 that newly uncovered emails suggested Hunter Biden had introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company. The newspaper said it had obtained the alleged emails from Rudy Giuliani, described as a top adviser to Donald Trump.
On the same day, Twitter and Facebook announced that they were limiting the distribution of the article until it was fact-checked. The restriction on the Trump campaign's account followed the next day.
A Ukrainian name in an American contest
The episode belonged to a wider set of claims. As later described, since 2016 Trump and his allies had promoted several conspiracy theories tied to the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal. One sought to blame Ukraine, rather than Russia, for interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. Others involved accusations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
For readers in Kyiv, the significance of 15 October 2020 lay in how a Ukrainian company's name again featured in a United States political fight. The measures taken by the two platforms, and the locking of a campaign account, showed how contested the handling of that material had become within days of the Post's publication.
