Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday unveiled what drove former Twitter executives to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
Dubbed “The Twitter Files,” Taibbi published his reporting in a thread on his Twitter account, which he said was based on “thousands of internal documents obtained by sources” from the social media platform.
The series of posts on Twitter contained communications amongst Twitter employees as they grappled with how to excuse their decision to censor the Hunter Biden report.
Twitter’s Censorship Tools
Taibbi said “The Twitter Files” tell an “incredible story” about how one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms used its powerful tools to delete tweets at the request of “connected actors.”The tools Twitter employees used for “controlling speech” were originally designed to combat spam and financial fraudsters, Taibbi said. But over time, staff began “to find more and more uses for these tools.”
Twitter’s censorship system was well established by 2020, an election year, and while both sides of U.S. politics had access, the political bias of the majority of the platform’s employees meant Democrats had more avenues to “complain” about tweets, according to Taibbi.
Throughout his thread, Taibbi shared screenshots of emails and communications between and with Twitter executives that provided a glimpse into how the system worked to censor the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden.
One email dated Oct. 24, 2020, appears to show a Twitter executive sharing a list of five tweets allegedly identified by people from the campaign of then-candidate Joe Biden, a Democrat.
“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’”
Twitter Suppresses Hunter Biden Report
In order to suppress the Hunter Biden report, Twitter executives marked it as “unsafe,” limiting its spread, even blocking it from being directly shared via the platform’s direct message function.Taibbi noted that such extreme restrictions were reserved for content such as child pornography.
For sharing the report, then-White House press secretary Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account, prompting a stern email from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn to Caroline Strom, who was Twitter’s public policy executive.
Hahn demanded to know when McEnany’s account would be unlocked and why no one at Twitter informed him the company would be censoring news articles.
“Like I said, at least pretend to care for the next 20 days,” he wrote.
Twitter’s Internal Comms Reveal Confusion
Taibbi reported that the decision to censor the report came from the highest levels of Twitter but without the knowledge of then-CEO Jack Dorsey.Vijaya Gadde, who was the head of legal, policy, and trust at the company, played a “key role,” according to Taibbi.
“‘They just freelanced it,’ is how one former employee characterized the decision,” Taibbi wrote.
Taibbi reported that one former employee he spoke with said that at this point, “everyone knew this was [expletive],” but that the executives decided to “err on the side of … continuing to err.”
The honesty of that excuse was questioned by Brandon Borrman, the former vice president of global communications.
Democrat Raises First Amendment Concerns
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) contacted Gadde on Oct. 14, 2020, to let her know their decision to censor the story and lock McEnany out of her account was generating a “huge backlash” in Washington, D.C.Gadde came back to Khanna, citing the company’s hacked materials policy, prompting Khanna to explicitly clarify that his concerns were related to the First Amendment implications of Twitter’s decision.
“But in the heat of a Presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good,” Khanna added.
The first installment of Taibbi’s reporting exposed the censorship system that enabled Twitter executives, who are mostly Democrat-aligned, to censor a controversial story about the son of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
Taibbi, who usually writes for his subscribers on Substack, presented his report as a series of “live tweets” on Twitter, with new paragraphs published one after another over a period of time on Friday evening.
He noted that there was “much more to come” and promised answers to burning questions many figures—usually conservatives—have raised about issues like “shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more.”
“These issues are not limited to the political right,” Taibbi noted.