Computer shop owner sues Twitter for $500 mn

San Francisco: A computer repair shop owner in the US has sued Twitter for $500 million in defamation after his name appeared in a controversial New York Post involving Joe Bidens son Hunter.

The report in October claimed that Delaware-based The Mac Shop had been paid to recover data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. It published emails and pictures allegedly from a copy of the hard drive.

Facebook and Twitter both restricted the article on their respective platforms after it went viral, and Twitter pointed to its ban on posting "hacked materials" as an explanation.

Now, according to The Verge, John Paul Mac Isaac, who was the owner of The Mac Shop, has sued Twitter, claiming the micro-blogging platform specifically made this decision to "communicate to the world that (Mac Isaac) is a hacker."

Isaac said that he is "now widely considered a hacker" because of Twitter.

He is demanding $500 million and a public retraction from Twitter.

The complaint cited several negative business reviews that criticise Mac Isaac based on the facts of the story, "but it's unclear why Twitter should be held liable for those reviews". Twitter was yet to react to the report.