Elon Musk released the first of a series of internal communications of his newly-acquired Twitter apparently revealing a company intertwined in political propagandizing and influence-peddling.
In what he dubbed the first of his “Twitter Files,” Musk worked with Substack journalist Matt Taibbi to release a bevy of documents that help frame the depths of Twitter’s censorship of speech for ideological and political purposes.
This first centered primarily on Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden story and its apparent hand-in-hand working relationship with the Biden campaign to control the narrative on its platform.
Taibbi began his Twitter thread with the information he received from Musk by setting the stakes. He reminded his audience that Twitter started with a mission to give people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
Yet early into its ascent, the prevalence of spam and financial fraudsters necessitated the development of tools on Twitter’s site to censor, filter, and moderate some content.
“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 tweeted.
Taibbi then showed the first of the “receipts,” tweeting a screenshot of an apparent email from a Twitter executive to lower staff that read, “More to review from the Biden team:” and listed five tweets.
Less than three hours later, the Twitter employee reportedly responded to the senior manager, “handled these.”
Taibbi’s reveal of the Twitter Files documents given to him by Musk suggested that speech censorship was based more on personal relationships maintained between outsiders and key Twitter staff.
For example, Taibbi claims that he also reviewed instances in which the Trump White House requested action by Twitter during the 2020 campaign, and those requests were honored.
However, Taibbi wrote, “this system wasn’t balanced.”
He continued, “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.”
Taibbi accompanied this tweet with a snapshot of campaign finance data revealing that 98.47% of Twitter employees’ political contributions in 2020 were to Democrats.
After this table setting, Taibbi launched into what he called “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.”
After the Hunter Biden laptop story broke just weeks before the presidential election in November 2020, Taibbi claims his work reveals that “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,” he remarked.
Internal documents reveal the apparently tortured discussion amongst Twitter employees as they utilized their most heavy-handed censorship tools to suppress the sharing of the story on their platform under the guise of not allowing the spread of information gained as the result of “hacking.”
Former VP of Global Comms for Twitter Brandon Borrman asked his team, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy [of not sharing hacked materials]?”
According to Taibbi, a former Twitter employee described the situation as a farce.
“They just freelanced it,” the employee claimed. “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.”
Musk has promised more additions to his Twitter Files, and time will tell what more he uncovers and makes public.
