Musk: Disclosure on Twitter's Censoring of Hunter Biden Laptop Saga Needed to 'Restore Public Trust'

Elon Musk, Twitter's new chief executive, has hinted that more disclosures might be coming about how the social media site along with Facebook* sought to censor the now-notorious Hunter Biden "laptop from Hell" story ahead of and during the 2020 presidential election.

After news personality Alex Lorusso went on Twitter to ask his followers to "raise your hand" if they favored making public "all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost's story on Hunter Biden’s laptop", the US billionaire entrepreneur was quick to respond.

Musk's cryptic comment under the post highlighted that further revelations were "necessary to restore public trust”.

Back in April, when Musk first set out to buy the microblogging site in a deal worth $44Bln - a deal finally sealed on 28 October - the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive denounced Twitter’s decision to ban The New York Post’s exclusive story about Hunter Biden’s shady overseas business dealings in the run up to the November 2020 presidential election.

After reporter Saagar Enjeti tweeted an article stating how Twitter's then top lawyer - Vijaya Gadde - acted as "top censorship advocate" on the platform and blacklisted the Hunter Biden laptop story, the tech billionaire slammed the move.

The exclusive story which The New York Post originally ran on 14 October 2020 first suggested that a pay-to-play corruption scheme existed whereby Hunter Biden sold businessmen and women from a host of foreign entities - including countries such as China and Russia - access to his father Joe Biden while the latter was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

The details came to light after over 200 gigabytes of data, including nearly 130,000 emails, plus thousands of text messages from Hunter Biden’s iPhone, photos and videos, and other files were discovered on the water-damaged MacBook Pro he had left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, recovered the data but Hunter Biden never retrieved his laptop. According to the repair technician, while copying and verifying files, he found both pornographic material featuring Biden, as well as potentially “geopolitically sensitive” information about his alleged dubious dealings with foreign businessmen.

Despite the Post publishing several additional follow-up reports after first breaking the story, where emails referred to a “Big Guy” who was to receive a cut of the money, the reporting was studiously swept under the rug by mainstream media, declared a "Russian disinformation" scheme and censored by Facebook* and Twitter.

At the time, Twitter justified its decision to ban the story on Hunter Biden by labeling it as “content obtained through hacking that contains private information”. A plethora of mainstream outlets also eagerly sought to discredit the story.

However, a couple of mainstream media outlets confirmed that the laptop was authentic earlier this year, and that the damning information contained on the device was genuine amid ongoing Justice Department investigations into Hunter Biden’s taxes and dubious foreign consulting work.

GOP lawmakers have since announced a formal probe into the activities of the Biden family, citing suspected criminal activity, some of which they allege may pose a threat to national security.

After gaining control of the House in the November mid-term elections, the Republicans from the chamber’s Committee on Oversight and Reform announced that a formal inquiry into the Biden family’s business activities would be conducted once the next Congress is sworn in in January 2023. In their presentation, Republicans previewed an array of suspected Biden business dealings with partners around the world.