Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post’s blockbuster “Hunter Biden laptop” story merely confirms what most knew already — that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.
In a Tweet thread on Dec. 2, journalist Matt Taibbi exposes the smoking gun — the frantic attempts to claim without evidence that any reference to the NY Post’s story had to be banned from the platform because it might have come from “hacked materials.” This, we can see now, was never seriously believed, even inside Twitter, as the email exchanges make clear.
The Post story was no “hack.” It was not “Russian disinformation.” Nor was it “unsafe.” The executives running Twitter in the 20 days before the 2020 presidential election clearly knew that, and tried to find other justifications for what amounted to raw censorship.
With perhaps one hopeful exception, though, there is nothing new about any of this. Twitter’s bias in censoring or banning conservative accounts for “hate speech” while happily servicing accounts for Iran’s “Supreme Leader” and the Taliban is a running joke. In a series of secretly recorded interviews with Twitter employees, Project Veritas had already confirmed that “shadow-banning,” manipulating the number of followers shown by certain accounts, and selectively “de-boosting” certain tweets in its algorithms was a well-established, standard manipulation of the platform’s stated purpose: “We serve the public conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.”
Turkey: “Of course we will invade the Greek islands”!
Still, Taibbi’s disclosures are the paper trail proving these policies were discussed and enforced at the highest levels of the company prior to Musk’s purchase. Indeed, the unfairness of these policies was apparently the very reason Musk moved to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Musk has been promising to make these disclosures public since taking over the company, and smartly gave them to Taibbi to vet before doing so.
The “one small exception” was the quiet effort documented in the release by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a very progressive Democrat whose district includes most of Silicon Valley, to appeal to Twitter’s then head of legal, policy, and trust, Vijaya Gadde, to respect the principle of the First Amendment. In an email exchange, Khanna gave Gadde a robust defense of free speech (and some sound political advice), all of which fell on her deaf ears. Kudos to Khanna for his lonely but principled stand for free speech. Taibbi also noted in his thread that Khanna was the only Democratic official to do so.
Read more: Gatestone Institute
