Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has released documents that show the company’s former management censored news about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden at the request of Biden’s team before the 2020 presidential election.
On Friday, Musk retweeted a thread from the account of the independent author and journalist Matt Taibbi. In a series of tweets, Taibbi explained why the news about Hunter Biden’s laptop was censored.
A 2020 headline in the New York Post said, “Smoking-gun email shows how Hunter Biden introduced a Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” referring to Joe Biden, who was the vice president at the time.
But the story never caught on in the mainstream media. This may have been because Twitter filtered the story and stopped it from getting out to the public.
It was “routine” to be asked to delete tweets.
The released records, which seem to be censored emails from Twitter employees, explain why the tech giant decided to hide the story in the last days of the 2020 presidential campaign.
“Some of the first tools for controlling speech were made to stop spam and stop people from stealing money.
Over time, Twitter employees and managers found more and more ways to use these tools.
People from outside the company started asking it to change people’s speech, at first just a little bit, then more often, and finally all the time “Taibbi sent a tweet.
“By 2020, it was common for people with connections to ask others to delete their tweets.
One executive would write to another, “There’s more from the Biden team to look over.”
“Handled,” the answer would come back.
The journalist posted the tweets along with a screenshot of an internal email that had links to tweets that were supposed to be deleted.
Taibbi also revealed something else in a tweet: “White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account because she tweeted about the story. This made Trump campaign worker Mike Hahn very angry, and he wrote a letter about it.
Elon Musk said that Vijaya Gadde, the former Chief Legal Officer of Twitter, played a “significant role” in making sure that the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t get out in 2020.
Musk also sent out a second tweet that said, “Watch tomorrow for Episode 2 of The Twitter Files.” This suggests that the CEO will keep talking about more scandals from Twitter’s past.
