"Twitter Was Acting on Orders from the government to suppress free speech' ....Musk releases Hunter Biden laptop files

 

Elon Musk said that  Twitter was acting on the orders of the federal government when it allegedly censored stories surrounding the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop in the buildup to the 2020 election.

Musk made the declaration Friday online in a barrage of tweets he tauntingly titled the 'Twitter Files,' which saw the CEO take aim at his new company for supposed collusion with the Biden campaign by leaking old company emails.

The leaked correspondence contained damning insider communications that predate Musk’s ownership, which provided insight to the dissent and confusion seen within the company as it responded to reporting on the scandal in October 2020.

The emails provided new detail on Twitter’s shady censorship decision, which Musk said was made behind the scenes 'at the highest levels of the company' at the behest of Biden officials, and 'based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.'

Musk, however, outsourced those findings to journalist Matt Taibbi, giving him access to the explosive documents, which the reporter published in excerpts on the social media site Friday evening.

The thread contained redacted emails in which Twitter executives engaged in the foot-dragging indecision to pull prominent tweets noting the scandal, as outcry grew over the suppression. In one exchange, staffers from Biden campaign requested specific tweets be taken down - to which executives duly complied.

'More to review from the Biden team,' one staffer wrote on October 24, days ahead of the presidential election, listing five tweets. 'Handled these,' another replied three hours later.

It is not specifically stated that the since-deleted tweets were pulled due to their dealing with the laptop scandal.

However, according to Taibbi, a former writer for Rolling Stone, the company emails were nixed due to a request 'from the Biden team' shortly after the company began to crack down on story, first reported 10 days earlier, wanting it taken down.

Another message, dated October 24, 2020, supports this claim, and references 'an additional report from DNC' in an apparent reference to the Democratic National Committee.

The tweet in question adds: 'More to review from the Biden team,' along with the list of tweets that would later be deleted.

The contents of those tweets are currently unknown. 

Weeks ahead of the election in October 2020, Twitter prevented sharing of a story about Hunter's involvement with a Chinese oil giant – and his then-presidential candidate father Joe Biden's potential slice of a multi-million-dollar deal with the foreign firm.

Other emails between Twitter staffers further supported the claims from Musk that suggested Biden's team may have circumvented the First Amendment with their alleged suppressing of the stories.

In the leaked materials, unnamed high-ranking staffers pointed to supposed infractions of their 'hacked materials policy' as reasoning behind the suppression. 

All were published in the immediate aftermath of the New York Post's reporting on the story on October 14, including one from the White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who had her account locked as a result.

Musk and Taibbi, went on to accuse Twitter staffers of succumbing from requests from not only Democrats, but high-powered Republicans, to pull content they deemed problematic, pointing to donations received by the company from both parties.

In 2020, Taibbi revealed, 'requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.' 

Donations to Twitter staff from Democrats during the election cycle, however, was particularly pronounced - to the tune of $909,431 - compared to a paltry $14,137 sent in by conservatives. 

Taibbi tweeted: 'Both parties had access to these tools,' adding 'in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.'

He went on to added, however, that the 'system wasn’t balanced' and 'was based on contacts' - adding how Twitter allegedly engaged in great lengths to halt the spread of the Biden story, including tactics usually reserved for preventing the sharing of child porn.

'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,' Taibbi said.

He continued: 'The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read,' before sharing a slew of documents supporting the pair's allegations.

The heavily redacted documents, the journalist teased, contained correspondence from 'multiple current and former high-level executives.'

Prior to the reveal, Taibbi disclaimed 'there’s no evidence - that I've seen' that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story - but said that 'the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey.'

The company's progressive head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde, he added, 'played a crucial role in the decision.'

Taibbi claimed emails showed Dorsey intervening multiple times to question the censorship, amid the scramble to limit sharing of the New York Post's Hunter story.

The journalist also added that he had not seen any evidence that the federal government had a role in suppressing the story.

However, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company received a briefing from the FBI ahead of the 2020 election warning of disinformation campaigns.

The briefing led to Facebook being on high alert for Russian propaganda – which Hunter's laptop was initially tarred as by top former intelligence officials, until DailyMail.com proved it was real. 

Following the host of seemingly damning posts, Musk, wrote, 'Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review.'

Taibbi, a popular podcaster and former Rolling Stone politics correspondent, shared one October 14 2020 email from Donald Trump's campaign team to Twitter staff complaining that McEnany had been locked out of her account 'for simply talking about' the New York Post story.

Twitter's public policy executive Caroline Strom forwarded the email to an 'ops analyst' at the social media company, who wrote back that: 'the user was bounced by Site Integrity for violating our Hacked Materials policy.'

At that time, the Biden campaign had not disputed the veracity of the material from Hunter's abandoned laptop, which DailyMail.com later authenticated using top cyber forensics experts.

'They just freelanced it,' one former employee told the podcaster. '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.'

'Everyone knew this was f***ed,' an anonymous ex staffer reportedly told Taibbi.

Emails showed internal arguments breaking out among senior Twitter staff over the suppression of the Post's story – which included lurid details of Hunter's escapades with prostitutes and hard drugs, as well as worrying evidence of potential corruption involving Ukrainian gas company Burisma and his links to Chinese firms.

In one striking exchange, Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, emailed former Twitter Head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde in alarm at the suppression of the story, saying 'this seems a violation of the 1st Amendment principles.' 

But another email from a DC lobbying firm contained a stark warning: some Democrats on Capitol Hill wanted to see more crackdowns like the one on the Hunter Biden story - even after being reminded of Americans' First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. 

One staffer, Trenton Kennedy, allegedly wrote: 'I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.'

'I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we're waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials. We'll face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.'

Another, Katie Rosborough, shot back with a link to a Fox News article about Hunter's laptop, asking: 'will we also mark similar stories as unsafe?'

The internal discussions showed that despite admitting 'the facts remain unclear', Twitter decided on 'preventing this content from being amplified.'

One staffer, Ian Plunkett, wrote that the site should be 'cautiously interpreting this through the lens of our hacked materials policy and allowing the link with a warning and a significant reduction of spread.'

Even senior executives were questioning the veracity of the claims the laptop material was hacked.

Former VP of global communications Brandon Borrman, wrote: 'To Ian's point, can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy? i.e. As part of our approach to addressing potentially hacked materials, we are limiting visibility of related stories on Twitter while our investigation is ongoing.'

The censorship even caused one Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna to write to Gadde that it was 'generating huge backlash on hill re speech' – referring to concerns in Washington DC over limitations on free speech being imposed by Twitter.

'In the heat of a Presidential campaign restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good,' Khanna wrote.

Research firm NetChoice wrote to Twitter's head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson the next day on October 15 2022, warning that 'both Democrats and the Republicans were angry' about the suppression, according to the emails obtained by Taibbi.

Taibbi wrote that the Trump campaign had takedown requests granted too, but reported that staffers were taking far more from Biden's team.

'By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine,' he wrote. 'Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party.

'Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.

'However: this system wasn't 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 shared statistics from OpenSecrets, showing political donations by Twitter staff were between 96% and 99% to Democrats, with a total $909,431 given to Democrats in the 2020 election cycle and just $14,137 to Republicans by individuals linked to the company. 

In the email to Culbertson, Szabo wrote that he had polled several lawmakers and their staff on the Hill, and that some Democrat lawmakers were less concerned about the First Amendment.

'The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they're corrupting democracy and making all 'truth' relative,' Szabo wrote. 'When pushed on how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: 'the First Amendment isn't absolute.'

According to the emails, Twitter was feeling the heat from both sides of the political aisle: Republicans livid over censorship, and Democrats complaining the site 'doesn't moderate enough harmful content so when it does… it becomes a story.'

Szabo wrote that Democrat lawmakers 'complained that the companies are inept: They let conservatives muddy the water and make the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden is innocent.'

'They linked this to Hillary Clinton's email scandal: she did nothing wrong but because the press wouldn't let the story go, it became a scandal far out of proportion,' Szabo added in his email to the Twitter executive.

'In their mind, social media is doing the same thing: it doesn't moderate enough harmful content so when it does, like it did yesterday, it becomes a story. If the companies moderated more, conservatives wouldn't even think to use social media for disinformation, misinformation, or otherwise.'

Musk's choice to grant behind-the-scenes access to Taibbi may be interpreted as a sign of his unfavorable views of major media organizations.

The journalist has written books critical of cable news on both the right and left of the political spectrum, accusing both MSNBC and Fox of polarizing the country.

He has said he admires liberal firebrand Bernie Sanders, but also has enraged left wing activists by slamming cancel culture.

He also was critical of Twitter's suppression of the Biden scandal from the beginning.

On October 24 2020, about a week after the story about Hunter's abandoned laptop and its shocking contents broke, Taibbi wrote a post on his substack titled: 'With the Hunter Biden expose, suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story'.

The piece was sent by Dorsey to his head of legal Gadde, one of the Twitter internal emails shows.

In a tweet on Friday evening, Musk accused the Twitter staffers: 'If this isn't a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment, what is?'

Taibbi wrote that according to his sources, censoring tweets because they shared 'hacked materials' usually required an official finding of a hack by law enforcement, but that policy was abandoned with Hunter's laptop.

In an email the day after the story broke, one executive allegedly wrote to staff admitting that the New York Post and the Trump campaigns tweets had been censored, among others.

'Twitter actioned Tweets yesterday relating to two NY Post articles that were tweeted out that allegedly included pictures and screenshots of emails from a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, Presidential candidate Joe Biden's son,' the alleged internal Twitter email shared by Taibbi said.

'Our teams made the determination that the materials fall under our Hacked Materials Policy, in addition to sharing personal information, so links were actioned. As you may know, this existing policy framework was launched in 2018 to mitigate real-time harm based on hack and leak scenarios coming out of the 2016 election.

'I know there are questions that you probably have and are also probably getting a lot of incoming from stakeholders - governmental, academic, civil society, etc. The last 24 hours certainly has been a whirlwind with lots of curves and unknowns and we fully expect that the issues surrounding this matter will continue to swirl in the coming days so thank you to everyone for your patience.'