'Twitter Files' Reveal Internal Doubts About 'Hacked' Excuse For Censoring Hunter Biden Laptop Story
04:22 GMT 03.12.2022 (Updated: 12:57 GMT 14.04.2023)
© AP Photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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The inside story of how Twitter suppressed a damaging story regarding US President Joe Biden just weeks before his election was finally revealed in a multi-part post published to the social media giant.
Twitter began censoring mentions of an explosive October 2020 New York Post report detailing the sordid contents of a laptop left by Hunter Biden at a computer repair store---going as far as to suspend the account of White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany---under the excuse that the Biden story was in violation of Twitter’s “Hacked Materials policy,” investigative journalist Matt Taibi revealed Friday.
"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," Taibbi said a Twitter thread.
1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Per Taibi, in many cases Twitter did so despite lacking any proof for their claim that the laptop material had been obtained through illegal means. And email records indicate they knew it, too.
“I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker reportedly wrote at the time in an email.
“Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” one former Twitter employee reportedly told Taibi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
In another leaked email exchange, Trenton Kennedy, Twitter’s U.S. Policy Communications Manager, admitted he was “struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe” as well.
Noting that the company will “face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe,” Kennedy proposed an excuse that could be fed to the public: “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.”
Musk: Disclosure on Twitter's Censoring of Hunter Biden Laptop Saga Needed to 'Restore Public Trust'
25 November 2022, 05:54 GMT
Subsequent investigations by US law enforcement and media outlets would confirm the story was not, in fact, the result of hacked materials. But at that point, there was heavy speculation to the contrary.
And less than a week later, at least 50 former senior US intelligence officials signed an open letter insisting without evidence that the laptop revelations had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Facebook* also censored the story at the time, and the CEO of its parent company, Meta*, suggested in August that the move was implemented at the behest of the FBI.
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us---some folks on our team---and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert,'" Zuckerberg said in an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“We just kind of thought: Hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement---they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” Zuckerberg insisted.
Virtually every major Western media outlet refused to publish 2020’s ‘October surprise’ in the form of files on Hunter Biden’s computer which included videos depicting the future US president’s son smoking crack while engaging in sex acts, and emails linking some Ukrainian oligarchs with his father’s business dealings. Most papers took the view encouraged by the FBI that the laptop story was nothing more than Kremlin-sponsored disinformation.
Two years later, nearly all of them have backtracked. In November, CBS News joined the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and CNN in issuing a long-awaited correction acknowledging the laptop’s authenticity.
2 December 2022, 12:48 GMT
Social media users were abuzz with speculation after Twitter owner Elon Musk promised to reveal the full truth surrounding Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in a viral post Friday evening.
“What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!” Musk teased – in a post which racked up nearly half a million likes in just a few hours.
*Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is banned in Russia over extremist activities.
