Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Friday shared the first part of 'The Twitter Files'—a series of tweets by independent journalist and author Matt Taibbi revealing how the platform censored a controversial article on Hunter Biden in 2020. “Here, we go!!" Musk wrote on Twitter while sharing Taibbi's thread based on “thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter”.
In one of the opening tweets, Taibbi wrote: “The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.”
“Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time," the independent journalist said, adding that as time passed “the company was slowly forced to add those barriers”. "Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party," he wrote. In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honoured, he added
He then moved on to the most controversial part of the Twitter thread—"How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story". “On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop,” he continued.
Taibbi claimed that the social media giant “took extraordinary steps to suppress” New York Post’s 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 said in a tweet.
The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role, he wrote. The lengthy thread then goes on to detail the internal exchanges about Twitter's move to restrict access to the article. Taibbi said that US Rep. Ro Khanna appeared to be the only Democrat who expressed concerns about the ramifications of Twitter's decision.
In the article published in October 2020, New York Post revealed that Hunter Biden introduced his father Joe Biden, then the US Vice President, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden had put pressure on government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
"Tune in for episode 2 of The Twitter Files tomorrow," Musk tweeted on Friday.
