JIM GERAGHTY: Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi: ‘Twitter Files’ Paint an Ugly Portrait.
The revelations of the “Twitter Files” paint an ugly portrait of the individuals who made decisions about standards of content on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign. The company’s senior management — oddly, without consulting or involving CEO Jack Dorsey — basically decided unilaterally that people shouldn’t be allowed to read the New York Post’s article, which laid out emails indicating that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm, “less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, gave reporter Matt Taibbi access to internal company emails and records, and Taibbi laid out in a series of tweets how the company “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.”
The reasoning behind the ban of the article was the contention that it included “hacked materials,” even though there was no evidence of hacking. The Post said the information was obtained from a computer that was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019 and never reclaimed. This was not electronic theft; this was old-fashioned reporting — and exceptionally bad judgment on Hunter Biden’s part, which at this point shouldn’t seem implausible to anyone.
Note that Twitter made its decision to restrict access to and distribution of the Post story before more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter contending that the trove of emails from Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” (In retrospect, the characterization of it as an “information operation” instead of a “disinformation operation” was a revealing admission.)
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey must have known what was coming when he tweeted in April:
