Three weeks before the 2020 US presidential election, Twitter played a prominent role, obscuring the New York Post scoop on secret emails from Hunter Biden, son of Democratic candidate Joe Biden. And the operation could probably have been carried out at the request of the Biden campaign team, prompting content checkers to violate some internal rules. But at stake was the impact on the electoral campaign.
The story was told on Twitter in a very long thread by freelance journalist Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stones magazine contributor, iwhose scoop had been announced more than an hour earlier by Elon Musk, with a series of posts that had sent millions of followers into fibrillation of the billionaire and owner of the social network.
Secret internal files would be made available to the network. What has emerged is a structured system for monitoring and reviewing tweets, including on detailed requests from Washington: Taibbi premised that the reportdirect with Twitter’s control team both parties had it, and the White House itself, under Donald Trump, had made requests to censor some posts and accounts, and the requests “were met and met”.
But the journalist suggests that the “reviewers” would have ended up biasing their intervention in favor of the Democratsi, considering that the vast majority of employees were made up of “donors to the Democratic campaign”.
What Musk and Taibbi want to highlight is how the system had gone “out of control”, even without the knowledge of the very top management of the platform. The then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in an internal email had called the “suppression” of news about Hunter Biden “more serious than the story itself”.
“Celebrities or unknowns – he adds – could be removed or analyzed at the request of a political party“. Among the famous people who ended up under the Twitter lens in October 2020 is the actor EsTrumpian host James Woods. In an internal email, a request for “control” appears on a series of accounts, listed, and that request comes from the “Biden team”.
From Twitter they reply that they would take care of it. Taibbi hints that the same happened from the Trump campaign as well, but documenting it would have dampened the impact of today’s story somewhat. And the heart of this is the scoop on Biden’s son, which unfolds over several acts.
“On October 14, 2020 – writes the journalist – the New York Post published the story of the secret emails that emerged from Hunter Biden’s abandoned computer”. “Twitter – he continues – took exceptional steps to suppress the story and remove the links”. The platform technicians would also have blocked the transmission of the link with the article via direct message, using a measure adopted only in extreme cases, such as child pornography content .
White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany – continues the journalist – could not access her account to relaunch the story”. This move led a Trump campaign staffer, Mike Hahn, to send a furious letter of protest to Twitter: “Kayleigh McEnany was blocked from accessing hers,” she wrote account for simply reporting on the New York Post story. All he had done was cite the story and news reported by other outlets and not contested by the Biden campaign. I need an answer immediately on when and how it will be released.”
Hahn asked how no one had informed him of Twitter’s policy of censoring newspaper reports. “I expect at least – concluded the email – that you take care of it in the next twenty days”. That is the time window it would haveled to Election Day. The protest email prompted Caroline Strom, head of public policy at Twitter, to ask the internal team what had happened. An analyst had replied: “The account has been blocked for violating the policy on hacked material.”
But at the moment, says Taibbi, no one knew for sure whether the Hunter Biden email story was hacked or, as it would later turn out, only surfaced because the candidate’s son forgot his computer at a repair shop. However in the end, and perhaps it is not quite what Musk hoped for, it is the former Twitter leaders who emerge strengthened, because Dorsey emerges as the one who did not like the connivance between the controllers and the staff of the two campaigns.
Taibbi, at the end of the thread, reiterates that the former CEO had started an internal analysis. Who knows if it will be enough to make him accept the fact that his personal email has been publicized in front of millions of users. But the story seems like only the first installment. Musk kept his more than 119 million followers awake overnight with an announcement: “Tune in tomorrow for Episode 2 of The Twitter Files”.
