Art Moore(WND)
As promised, Elon Musk released internal communications documenting Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s blockbuster stories before the 2020 election presenting evidence from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden that the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was covering up his family’s sale of access to the White House to the likes of Chinese Communist Party companies, and Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Musk began releasing the information Friday evening, tweet by tweet, through independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
The internal communications between Twitter officials show the Biden White House had a direct line to the social media giant to remove information it didn’t like.
Taibbi posted a screen shot of a message between Twitter employees showing that by 2020, requests to delete tweets from “connected actors” – people with an interest in the censorship – were routine.
One executive wrote to another, presenting a list of tweets to delete: “More to review from the Biden team.”
The reply came back, “Handled.”
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.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Here are other significant revelations:
- Twitter’s CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, was left out of the loop in the decision to suppress the New York Post’s stories.
- The move to censor the stories was led by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, who previously was responsible for decisions to ban the accounts of conservative figures and who fiercely opposed Musk’s takeover.
- Many Twitter insiders questioned the stated rationale that the New York Post’s stories violated the company’s “hacked materials” policy.
- A former Twitter employee told Taibbi: “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. They just freelanced it.”
- Members of Twitter’s communications and policy teams were concerned about the decision and the implications for the company’s relationship with Capitol Hill.
- Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California warned the decision had been met with a “huge backlash” on Capitol Hill.
- Accusing of violating Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy for sharing the story, the company locked then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her account three weeks before the 2020 election. Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn fired off a message to Twitter demanding her account be unlocked. “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days,” he wrote.
In a column Saturday for the New York Post, Miranda Devine – who spearheaded the October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop stories and later authored “The Laptop from Hell” – wrote that Musk “half-delivered” on his promise to tell all about Twitter’s censorship.
“What was missing were details of specific warnings we know the FBI made to Twitter about a Russian ‘hack and leak operation’ involving Hunter during their weekly meetings with top executives of the social media giant in the days and weeks before The Post published its exclusive bombshell,” she wrote.
Devine pointed to the testimony Tuesday of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan in a lawsuit against the Biden administration brought by Republican attorneys.
Chan said he organized weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Yoel Roth, who then was Twitter’s head of site integrity, said in a sworn declaration he was told during the meetings to expect “hack-and-leak operations” by state actors involving Hunter Biden.
It was Twitter’s policy of banning “hacked materials” that was cited Oct. 14, 2020, when it locked the Post’s account for two weeks and censored the revelations that Joe Biden was lying about his knowledge of the family influence-peddling business.
In a recent in-depth video interview with WND, Seamus Bruner, who along with Peter Schweizer uncovered evidence of the Biden family’s business long before the New York Post stories, breaks down the evidence as House Republicans prepare to investigate.
See a montage created by “War Room” showing the claim by media, Joe Biden and others that the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation ploy:
BANNON MONTAGE: Remember the lies pic.twitter.com/e6GHSwFojM
— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) December 3, 2022
Actor James Woods discussed with Fox News host Tucker Carlson the fresh revelation Friday night that Twitter removed his tweets at the direction of the Democratic National Committee.
Woods, informing Carlson he plans to sue the DNC, had a message for “Joe Biden, and all those rats who worked with you and the DNC.”
“I am not afraid of you, and I am coming for you.”
See the interview:
‘Battle for the future of civilization’
Earlier this week, amid Musk’s measures to protect free speech on Twitter, including the elimination of its COVID “misinformation policy,” the White House promised to keep “a close eye” on the social media platform.
The new Twitter owner made it clear he believes the stakes are high.
“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead,” he tweeted Monday.
At the White House on Monday, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House has been “been clear, that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation, when it comes to the hate that we’re seeing, that they take action, that they continue to action.”
“Again, we’re all keeping a close eye on this, we’re all monitoring what’s currently occurring, and we see, we see it with our own eyes what you all are reporting, and just for ourselves, what’s happening on Twitter.”
On Monday night, some Twitter users noticed the platform had dropped its COVID-19 misinformation policy. A post on the “transparency page of Twitter’s website said: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
During the pandemic, many censored or suppressed tweets, labeled “misinformation,” expressed viewpoints that are now acknowledged to be true or legitimate arguments, such as the ineffectiveness of masks, lockdowns and vaccines, and the theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
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