Internal communications between Twitter staff confirm the social media giant colluded to suppress the The New York Post’s story in 2020 about incriminating information found on an abandoned laptop computer owned by Hunter Biden, son of then presidential candidate Joe Biden..Elon Musk said recently a full disclosure was needed to determine why the company decided to block the bombshell report about the laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election..Musk said the “public deserves to know what really happened.”.“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead,” he tweeted, after vowing the files would “soon to be published on Twitter itself.”.Those files were published on Twitter on Friday in a series of tweets by independent journalist Mark Taibbi; tweets that also showed political influence by Twitter in the election..The devastating internal files showed the company responding to a request “from the Biden team” during the run-up to the 2020 election, shortly after the company cracked down on the Post’s scoop about the Hunter Biden laptop..One, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “More to review from the Biden team,” along with a list of tweets..Another, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “An additional report from DNC,” an apparent reference to the Democratic National Committee..In response, someone wrote back, “handled these.”.Taibbi’s tweets prove Twitter took extraordinary censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020..The platform prohibited users from sharing the article, including locking The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks because of baseless claims the report used hacked information..Twitter had in place algorithms that identified bogus tweets, said Taibbi.."Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly," Taibbi wrote. "By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: 'Handled.'".Both the Democrat and Republican parties had access to the tool, but Taibbi says the system was not balanced.."It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right," he wrote. "The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents (in his series of tweets). However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.”.Taibbi tweeted "there’s no evidence, that I've seen" that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story but that "the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role."."'They just freelanced it,' is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘Hacking was the excuse (for censoring the laptop story), 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 wrote..He then shared a screenshot of an exchange between Gadde, Twitter's former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy, who wrote "I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.".Twitter's former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker replied, "I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked" but added "it's reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.".Twitter’s censorship of the story led to then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany getting locked out of her account with just weeks to go before the 2020 election..In an email shared by Taibbi, Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn sent an angry missive to the social media giant demanding to know when she would be unlocked..“At least pretend to care for the next 20 days,” Hahn wrote..Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time, later admitted during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”.Many critics believe the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal and the legacy media was enough to sway the 2020 election in favour of his father..The congressional Oversight Committee, headed by Republicans has promised a full investigation into all of Hunter Biden’s activities and it appears a deeper investigation into Twitter will be added to its agenda.
