#TwitterFiles: Elon Musk publishes damning internal communications on political censorship, including the Hunter Biden case, and will publish more

It’s twisted/messed up [“f-ed”].

Twitter “simply improvised” its baseless decision to censor the New York Post scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop shortly before the 2020 election. Top executives at the social media giant agreeing the controversial decision was twisted/bogus [“f-ked”]as damning internal communications released by CEO Elon Musk on Friday revealed.

The chaos and confusion that reigned behind closed doors at Twitter immediately after the October 2020 Hunter Biden affair came to light shows that a small group of senior executives decided to label the Post story as “hacked material” without no evidence – this behind the back of then-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.

Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr Musk tweeted a link to freelance journalist Matt Taibbi’s account, which shed light on Twitter’s shady censorship decision by posting what appeared to be redacted emails between Twitter employees.

The decision to censor the Post story was made “at the highest levels of the company,” according to Taibbi, but without Dorsey’s involvement.

[…]

“Saying it was hacking was the excuse, but within hours pretty much everyone figured out it wouldn’t hold up. But no one had the courage to back down,” adds the ex-employee.

“They just improvised that,” a former employee told Taibbi of how the decision was made.

The decision left high-level executives puzzled.

“I find it difficult to understand the political basis for the decision to mark this site as dangerous,” wrote Trenton Kennedy, a communications manager, in an internal email to colleagues.

[…]

According [le journaliste indépendant] Matt Taibbi, Twitter even resorted to a rarely used tactic to stop the spread of information – blocking the sharing of story links via direct message, a tool usually used only in “extreme cases”, such as to stop dissemination of child pornography.

Twitter censorship of the story led to then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account being blocked a few weeks 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 unblocked.

“But at least pretend you care about it for the next 20 days,” Hahn wrote.

[…]

Matt Taibbi also revealed emails from the company responding to a request ‘from Joe Biden’s team’ during the run-up to the 2020 election – shortly after the company cracked down on the Hunter story Biden from the New York Post.

Another, dated Oct. 24, 2020, read “An additional DNC report,” an apparent reference to the Democratic National Committee.

Another, dated Oct. 24, 2020, read “Still more to review as requested by the Biden team,” along with a list of tweets.

In response, someone replied, “I dealt with them.”

Matt Taibbi also tweeted: “Both parties had access to these tools. For example, in 2020 requests from the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.”

But the former Rolling Stone editor said the “system was unbalanced” and “was contact-based.”

“Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly made up of people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” he writes.

Prior to his $44 billion buyout, Musk had already made his stance on the Post’s debacle against Twitter clear, saying in April that the platform’s decision was “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

Twitter, along with Facebook, took extraordinary censorship action against the Post when it first published its expose on the anthology of emails discovered on Mr Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.

The platform banned users from sharing the article – and also blocked the New York Post from its Twitter account for more than two weeks over baseless allegations that the article used hacked information.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time, later admitted during a Congressional hearing on disinformation and social media in March last year that the blocking of the Post article was a “total error”.

He did not want to reveal who was responsible for this error.

While many mainstream media outlets initially ignored or sought to undermine the Post’s information, The New York Times and The Washington Post eventually authenticated the notebook’s contents 18 months later.

The New York Post