New Twitter owner Elon Musk linked to a reporter revealing internal Twitter email exchanges on Friday night detailing the response to a request “from the Biden team” and indicated those on the left politically got preferential treatment to those on the right, according to the New York Post.
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He also said it would be “awesome” and then said they were doing some fact-checking.
Musk later tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who was posting potentially redacted emails from Twitter employees.
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.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Taibbi said they were a series, “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.”
Taibbi alleged: “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.”
He went on to mention the “Biden team” making requests and saying someone from Twitter replied, “handled these.”
The former Rolling Stone writer said: “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.”
Taibbi alleged Twitter staff “took extraordinary steps to suppress” The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links to the expose shared by users and posting warnings that they may be “unsafe.”
https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F 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”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
Twitter and Facebook both took censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.
The Post says Twitter prevented users from sharing the article — and even locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks and alleged The Post used hacked information. Taibbi said Twitter prevented the sharing of the article by direct message, an extremely uncommon move.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, said during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”
