The censorship of the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020 sparked outrage among liberal pundits, who rushed to discredit a bombshell Twitter thread from Elon Musk and Substack journalist Matt Taibbi. The thread revealed internal communications between Twitter employees and US lawmakers.
The revelations, dubbed the "Twitter Files," were made public by Taibbi on the social media platform on Friday night at Musk's request. Musk provided emails and other documents that revealed Twitter's internal censorship practices leading up to the 2020 presidential elections, including removing the Post's report.
Taibbi claimed that because there were more liberals on Twitter, requests to throttle conservative accounts were received more frequently. Among the revelations was that Twitter staff had open channels with powerful third parties, including members of both political parties, so they could flag tweets they deemed problematic and have them "handled."
The most notable were the documents Taibbi released, which showed conversations between high-level Twitter employees who ultimately agreed to emergency moderation measures to stop the spread of the Hunter Biden story, despite the fact that many of them were concerned they had little reason to use such measures.
According to one eye-opening email, Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, advised staff to suppress the New York Post story despite the fact that "the facts remain unclear" in light of the "lessons of 2016."
Although some liberals on the platform tried to intimidate Taibbi and Musk, they did their best to minimize the information from the "Files."
"Pod Save America" podcast co-host and former Obama White House staffer Jon Favreau criticized Musk directly: "Elon is spending the evening trying to embarrass someone who’s struggled with addiction so that he can juice engagement on the platform he bought that’s hemorrhaging money. Great guy."
Elon is spending the evening trying to embarrass someone who’s struggled with addiction so that he can juice engagement on the platform he bought that’s hemorrhaging money.
Great guy. pic.twitter.com/PP5JC115sO
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) December 2, 2022
Liberal commentator Brian Tyler Cohen tried to destroy the thread’s entire argument by saying, "So Twitter was acting under orders of the government except Biden wasn't POTUS in 2020. And it's a First Amendment violation except Twitter can't violate 1A as a private biz. And the takedown requests from team Biden were nudes against Twitter's TOS. But going great otherwise!"
