Elon Musk has released internal deliberations at Twitter around Hunter Biden’s computer files during the 2020 US presidential election.
On Friday evening, Twitter’s new owner promoted a leak of documents on his personal account.
In a lengthy thread, independent journalist Matt Taibbi said he received “thousands of internal documents” from Twitter sources pointing to the suppression of the Biden laptop story on Twitter in which the company controversially blocked people from tweeting and direct-messaging about the story.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography,” Taibbi tweeted.
A 2020 headline in the New York Post said “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” referring to Biden’s father, current US President Joe Biden, who was the country’s vice president at the time. But the story never gained traction in the mainstream media, possibly in part to Twitter filtering the story and putting a stranglehold on its dissemination to the public.
Shortly after the Post published the article, Twitter pointed to concerns about hacked materials as the reason for blocking the story. Twitter has a policy against the distribution of “hacked materials,” a product of how political operatives stole and then leaked Democrats’ emails during the 2016 election. Twitter at the time cited that policy as one of the reasons it had suppressed the article.
“They just freelanced it,” is how one former Twitter employee characterized the decision, according to Taibbi. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
Taibbi’s characterization of the internal documents pointed toward a Democratic bias from Twitter’s previous management that somehow never got to the top of the executive food chain until it was too late.
Early into the evening on Friday, the thread mostly revealed deliberations both internally and externally — including with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. — about Twitter’s move to restrict access to the article. Khanna appeared to question Twitter’s reasoning for blocking the story.
Musk tweeted in response to one of Taibbi’s tweets: “Ro Khanna is great”
In response to a request for comment, Khanna said he believes the Constitution and First Amendment are “sacred.”
“As the congressman who represents Silicon Valley, I felt Twitter’s actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns,” Khanna said in a statement. “Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree.”
