December 9, 2022
Elon Musk teased that he would release details about “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter”, and the suppression of conservatives on Twitter. He did not disappoint. Musk dropped “Twitter files #1 last week and #2 last night, providing details, internal Twitter communications, and some new revelations.
Twitter Files #1
Journalist Mike Taibbi, tasked with sifting through Twitter’s internal documents, began by explaining that originally Twitter “lived up to its mission statement” -to enable mass communication. It then became necessary to add controls to combat spam and fraudsters. However, over time Twitter employees found more uses for these tools, and outsiders began imploring the company to manipulate speech.
Taibbi explains that both Republicans and Democrats had access to these tools. However, virtually all of Twitter’s staff is on the left. Therefore Democrats had far more connections and channels within Twitter to request content moderation.
One of the most damning revelations was an internal communication revealing that the Biden administration frequently requested the removal of disfavored content.
The email read, “More to review from the Biden Team.” The response-
“Handled these.” Communications also revealed requests for content removal from the DNC were honored.
During an audio chat on “Twitter Spaces”, Musk was asked if he believed Twitter’s actions amounted to election interference. He responded :
‘’Democrats were not censored and left causes were not censored, but right, right causes and Republicans were…clearly if Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the very definition of election interference. What the hell else would you call it, of course, yes.”
When asked if “any political candidates either in the US or elsewhere were subject to shadow-banning” Musk replied, “Yes”.
Hunter Biden laptop Suppression
Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published never-before-seen emails and text messages from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop. Desperate to stop its dissemination Twitter erroneously declared its contents hacked material. A former Twitter employee told Taibbi, “They just freelanced it…Hacking was the excuse.”
In other words, they knew the Post did not illegally obtain the information on the laptop, yet they blocked the story. Twitter also locked the Post’s Twitter account for almost two weeks and suspended those who tried to share the allegations, including then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. They even blocked the story’s transmission via direct message, a tool only used before for extreme cases such as child pornography.
Inside Twitter, as disclosed on Taibbi’s Twitter thread, numerous executives questioned the appropriateness of their actions. However, Twitter’s deputy general counsel James Baker supported censoring the story. Baker advised, “that it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been {hacked} and that caution was warranted.”
Baker’s name is familiar because he was a top FBI official, serving as general counsel from 2014 until 2017- when the FBI was spying on and investigating Trump and his campaign. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Baker was the contact for Michael Sussmann, Clinton’s campaign lawyer who attempted to fuel the Russian collusion narrative by bringing the FBI erroneous “evidence” of a link between Trump and a Russian bank.
Baker also came under scrutiny when documents surfaced, revealing he had communicated with the far-left site Mother Jones’ David Corn shortly before Corn broke the story of the existence of the Steele dossier in October 2016. Many speculated that Baker was the source for Corn’s reporting. Corn has refused to name his source, although he has denied it was Baker. Baker joined Twitter in June 2020.
Shockingly, it was disscovered that Baker was secretly vetting the internal documents Musk had tasked independent journalists to review before releasing them to the public.
Taibbi tweeted on Tuesday night: “We can now tell you part of the reason why on Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter files’-without knowledge of new management.”
Was Baker working to prevent damaging information on the FBI from being part of the “Twitter files”? Was he attempting to hide evidence that the FBI used big tech as a back door to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election?
Incredibly, as revealed by the New York Post, in the run-up to the 2020 election, the FBI held weekly meetings with Facebook and Twitter. A sworn declaration, in December 2020 to the Federal Election Commission by Twitter’s former head of site integrity Yoel Roth, stated that the FBI warned them to expect “hack and leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden, “likely” in October.
Did the FBI know that the New York Post was going to publish the contents of the laptop, and attempt to preemptively debunk and suppress the story? The Post’s Miranda Devine effectively makes that case. We know that in the months leading up to the story’s publication, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer, Rudy Guiliani’s online cloud account under the pretext of a since dropped investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations. This surveillance gave the FBI access to Guiliani’s communications with Devine discussing information about the laptop and when the story would be published.
Thanks to FBI whistleblowers, we know that, despite receiving the computer in 2019, top FBI officials did not allow agents to review its contents until after the 2020 election. Whistleblowers have also claimed that the supervisory agent assigned to the Hunter Biden investigation ordered the probe into Hunter’s alleged criminal financial and related activity be closed.
Let’s not forget the 50-plus former intelligence officials who signed onto a letter claiming, with zero evidence, that information on the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. The politically motivated letter allowed Biden to duck questions about the laptop on the campaign trail. When Trump brought the issue up during one of the presidential debates, Biden cited the letter as evidence that it was Russian disinformation.
Twitter Files #2
Former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter Bari Weiss confirmed in a Twitter thread that Twitter indeed shadow-banned conservative voices and other content that did not go against “community standards”, but Twitter employees found ideologically objectionable.
Weiss wrote that:
“teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics- all in secret, without informing users.”
It is no surprise that the media has dismissed the “Twitter files” as a nothing-burger. After all, it would be hypocritical of them to criticize Twitter when they are guilty of doing the same- shaping the political narrative to aid the Democratic party.
Republicans have promised a litany of oversight hearings when they take control of the House in January. Hopefully, at the top of their agenda are investigations into the connections between US intelligence, the media, big tech, and the Democratic Party- actual threats to our Democracy.
