Elon Musk Releases THE TWITTER FILES: How Twitter Collaborated With “The Biden Team” To Cover Up The Hunter Notebook Story

Via ZeroHedge

In a greatly anticipated Friday night drop of what has was expected to be a cache of information involving the censoring of Hunter Biden’s notebook story days ahead of the 2020 presidential election, moments ago Elon Musk – who worked in collaboration with the notoriously independent gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi of “Vampire Squid” fame – has published the “Twitter Files.”

Shortly before their release, Matt Taibbi sent the following email to his substack subscribers:

Dear TK Readers:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.

The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.

Moments later Elon confirmed that he did, in fact, work with Taibbi:

And this is what Taibbi has been tweeting in the past few minutes (link here):

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

8. 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.”

9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:

11. This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.

12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.

… Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let’s jump forward

16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

18. Twitter 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.

19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”

20.This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:

21. Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy:  https://web.archive.org/web/20190717143909/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials

22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem…

23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.

24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

25.You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:

26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.

27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”

28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:

29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:

30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.

31. Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:

32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:

33.Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”

34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it’s a “tipping point,” complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”

35.Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:

36.Twitter files continued:  “THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”

Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it’s “not absolute”

37. An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get “unfucked” (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.

Developing

*  *  *

The release was telegraphed one week ago, when Musk acknowledged that revealing Twitter’s internal discussions surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 US election is “necessary to restore public trust.”

Recall that the Post had its Twitter account locked in October 2020 for reporting on the now-confirmed-to-be-real “laptop from hell,” which contained still-unprosecuted evidence of foreign influence peddling through then-Vice President Joe Biden – including a 2015 meeting with an executive of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.

Users who tried to share the link to the article were greeted with a message saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

Then, days after Musk’s tweet, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, admitted it was a ‘mistake’ to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In his first public appearance since becoming an ex-employee, Roth suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was simply ‘too difficult’ for Twitter to verify. Alternatively, the company could have perhaps simply trusted the Post, one of America’s oldest publications that doesn’t have a reputation for fabricating bombshell stories – like Twitter does with countless anonymous bombshells from other major publications.

We didn’t know what to believe. We didn’t know what was true. There was smoke,” Roth said during an interview at the Knight Foundation conference, as noted by the Epoch Times. “And ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.

“It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ alarm bells,” he said, referring to a notorious team of cyberspies affiliated with Russian military intelligence. “Everything about it looked like a hack and leak.”

When asked whether if it was a mistake to censor the story, Roth replied, “In my opinion, yes.”

Would Roth have suppressed the story if it was a Don Jr. laptop full of incriminating evidence?

* * *

Finally, it will be very interesting to see which “independent”, “impartial” and “objective” members of the Mainstream Media cover the Twitter Files, which unlike all that Russia collusion bullshit, was a real and actionable attempt to interfere with US democracy by covering up one of the most explosive political stories of a generation, not to mention an event that would have swayed the 2020 presidential election.

-----------------------------------------------------
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal

-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Click to visit the TBP Store for Great TBP Merchandise

27
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
Trapped in Portlandia
Trapped in Portlandia

Smart move by Musk recruiting a liberal true-teller like Matt Taibbi to reveal the sins of Twitter. Taibbi just got screwed, i.e., censored, by YouTube so he’s on the warpath.

Matt, welcome to our side of the fence. Have a seat over there with Kunstler. He too has learned the truth doesn’t lean left.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

And now the libs pile on Taibbi who’s got more integrity than all of them put together. One of them called him “some Substack guy”.

Anthony Aaron
Anthony Aaron

What a bunch of whiny, jealous bastards …

Anthony Aaron
Anthony Aaron

Even as a leftist for so many years, Taibbi was always worth reading … and, now, well he’s just getting his wings and getting ready to soar …

I wish him luck … and a red pill might just do him wonders …

AKJOHN
AKJOHN

Bob Dylan said it best.
All the criminals in their coats and ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.

Machinist
Machinist

Dylan sux.

TN Patriot
TN Patriot

It is just like the story Reid made up about Mitten’s taxes. After the election, Dirty Harry said “well, it worked, didn’t it?”

Ginger
Ginger

Would you not believe that after being treated such as that one would become a champion of truth and integrity? Especially a pious Mormon?
Jeremiah 17:9-10 NKJV
“The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it? I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings.
Harry Reid is right this moment receiving the fruit of his doings. FOREVER.

Obbledy
Obbledy

It WILL be interesting to see what drops….the things they don’t report would fill an ocean,otherwise not holding my breath.There is no Izvestia in Pravda nor Pravda in Izvestia!
The MSM is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US GOV.!….

Obbledy
Obbledy

So here we are on Sat.morn watching the MSM and the chyron…….nothing……zip,zilch,nada!!
Back to cartoons…….lol!
One can evade reality but not the consequences of evading reality…….😜

Captain_Obviuos
Captain_Obviuos
m
m

Waiting for the same commenters, who just before couldn’t find a single positive thing on Tulsa Gabbard, to now declare they believe Taibbi and Musk with all their heart. 😀

Swrichmond
Swrichmond

I cant find a single positive thing to say about Tulsi Gabbard. I’d say “I’d hit it”, but she wears way too much makeup.

I have too much life experience to believe any public figure with all my heart. If anything, covid proved that being a hard-edged cynic about public policy is a necessary skill for staying alive.

I have seen the “limited hangout” executed too many times with the aid of the complicit media. I have seen stories thrown against the wall to see what would stick, then modified repeatedly in real time until public outcry wanes. When you are watching the public piece of public affairs, you are watching a movie, with a script, actors, directors, producers, etc.

They’re doing this in plain view now.

Machinist
Machinist

Tulsi in about ten years.
comment image?v=1542321720

Thunder
Thunder

Should the three letter agencies not be captured and infiltrated with the Filth that is employed ther,. Charges would have been brought and nothing would have been hidden.
Just like with SFB, there is something so rotten in the justice system it no longer even functions for the safety of the people who pay for them to keep the laws

TN Patriot
TN Patriot

It is the Just Us system.

Just Thinking
Just Thinking

How long was it before Dorsey “became aware” of what was going on?

If it was more than 24hrs., I call BS that he didn’t know anything.

It just like Dr. Death and SBF: dodge, duck, deny.

awoke
awoke

Now do Jared and Ivanka

Anonymous
Anonymous

No.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading