“We’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified,” Twitter’s safety chief Yoel Roth said of why The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 was censored. He attached a “generic unsafe message” to the Tweet — “not ideal,” he wrote, “but it’s the only thing we have.”
In other words — we have to stop this, reasons be damned.
Roth’s message is part of a shocking collection of inside correspondence released by new Twitter owner Elon Musk through journalist Matt Taibbi. The messages reveal a small group of busybodies — a group that didn’t even include CEO Jack Dorsey — making their own decisions on what to delete or block based on their own liberal biases.
“They just freelanced it,” an employee says. “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.”
The Post’s reporting wasn’t just blocked, it was suppressed. “They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography,” Taibbi writes.
Even internally, the logic was seen as weak. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” Brandon Borrman, vice president of global communications, asked.
As the backlash grew, not just from Republicans but Democrat lawmakers worried about the implication of such censorship, “everyone knew this was f–ked,” says an employee. But it was taking a long time to “unf–k” it.
Twitter was directly involved in tilting an election. Everyone could see it, but because they were desperate for Donald Trump to lose and Joe Biden to win, that the media barely made a peep. Even after Hunter Biden’s former business partner gave a public press conference backing up exactly what The Post had reported.
After it became untenable to say the laptop wasn’t real, Twitter told us we could have our account back — we just had to delete the original Tweet. We could even put up a new Tweet linking to the Hunter Biden story, one that wouldn’t be censored, but we had to delete the original one.
The logic behind this blackmail escaped us. The Post refused. It would be 17 days before Twitter finally backed down and unfroze our account.
The bias was clear. After all, no one flagged The Times reporting on Trump’s private tax documents as “hacked materials.” The knee-jerk censorship only happened in one direction.
And, by the way, nothing really changed afterward. Twitter went right back to censoring those who didn’t toe the line on COVID and any other number of topics. As Taibbi also outlines, The Democratic National Committee and the Biden administration were in direct email contact with the Twitter content team, pointing them exactly to the Tweets they wanted suppressed.
It took a very expensive change of ownership for these details to come to light, and for the promise of less censorship in the future. That’s why the left is losing their minds.
