On Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted his way through some of the revelations he found in the Twitter Files, troves of private data from the inner workings of the company that were given to him by Elon Musk. In his thread he focused on the communications related to Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story that was broken by the New York Post in October 2020, just before the presidential election.
Remember that various surveys have suggested that had more people been aware of the information from that laptop, that Joe Biden was using his son as a conduit for illicit deals with foreign powers, they would not have voted for him. Twitter’s decision to censor the story quite likely altered the outcome of the election.
Watching Taibbi post his findings in real time reminded of when Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong with proof that US intelligence agencies were spying on American citizens. He handed the data to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, as documented in Poitras’ film Citizenfour. Like Taibbi’s revelations Friday night, Snowden showed us proof of what we suspected all along.
Key takeaways from the revelations tonight:
By October 2020, Twitter staff were colluding with the Biden campaign and the DNC to ban conservative accounts.
In 2018, campaign donations by Twitter staff were weighted more than 96% to the Democrats. By 2022, that percentage had grown to 99.73%.
Twitter’s policy for “hacked materials” usually relied on police reports, but with the Hunter Biden laptop they used this as an excuse to shut down the spread of the story.
The main instigator of the censorship was Vijaya Gadde, the Indian-born head of Twitter’s Legal, Policy, and Trust department. She would later go on to make the decision to ban President Donald Trump after January 6th.
In fact, Twitter founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey was out of the loop during all of this. He seemed powerless, and at one point forwarded an article by Matt Taibbi himself about the censorship to Gadde, but did nothing to stop it.
Emails reveal a chaotic workplace, as nobody knows how to make any sort of decision. Once Twitter embarked on the path of censoring the story using the “hacked materials” excuse, everything after that seemed like backward attempts to justify the decision.
Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, wrote to Gadde from his personal email with concerns that their actions were contrary to the Bill of Rights and the principles of free speech. His concerns were ignored as Gadde justified the censorship by pointing to the “hacked materials” policy.
A Twitter partner convened an informal poll among a few congressmen. The Republicans were aghast, while the Democrats were angry but supported the idea of censoring the story. All were concerned that this could impact Twitter’s position in the upcoming hearings on Section 230.
These revelations are only scratching the surface. Taibbi promises more to coming, “including answers about issues like shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more.”
Click below to read the whole thread:
Now that these revelations are out there, we need to put even more pressure on our elected leaders to do what is necessary to protect our inalienable right to free speech. The excuse that Twitter is a private company is absurd today. I have said many times that Twitter is the de facto public square, and should be treated as such. Those who break the law should be removed, but speech must not be censored. Even the things that Kanye West has been saying recently should be allowed - it should not be for anyone, whether a political leader, a CEO like Dorsey, or a foreign-born bureaucrat like Gadde to determine what an American citizen is allowed to say in public. Twitter and the other tech platforms should be treated like the telephone lines - can you imagine if AT&T or Verizon was listening in to every call, and could cut off service if they didn’t like what you said?
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter might go down as one of the seminal moments in the fight for liberty in America. I am glad to be here to see it!
First Amendment
CONGRESS shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
Twitter isn't Congress, anymore than Shell Oil is Congress, or a mom and pop business that tells its employees not to swear on the job or talk politics or religion is Congress.