Key takeaways from exposed twitter censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk planted a popcorn emoji next to his promise of “awesome” revelations about how the microblogging site had opted to censor the “Hunter Biden story.” And the billionaire Tesla CEO followed through on his promise. The first instalment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was dropped on December 2 after Musk had provided investigative journalist Matt Taibi with the social media platform’s internal documents.Twitter, conceived as a platform “to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers,” has been gradually injected with tools for “controlling speech” by its staff and executives, wrote independent journalist Matt Taibbi in a thread on his account. While tailored to combat spam and financial fraudsters, over time, the company found itself “petitioned” to “manipulate speech.”The original Hunter Biden scoop and how Twitter dealt with it is a glaring case in point, according to the journalist.The exclusive story run by The New York Post on October 14, 2020 first hinted at a pay-to-play corruption scheme whereby Hunter Biden had peddled access to his father Joe Biden while the latter was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president to businessmen and women from a host of foreign entities. The details emerged after over 200 gigabytes of data, including nearly 130,000 emails, plus thousands of text messages from Hunter Biden’s iPhone, photos and videos, and other files were discovered on the damaged MacBook Pro he had left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. It was store owner John Paul Mac Isaac who recovered the data and zeroed in on the potentially “geopolitically sensitive” information about Hunter’s alleged shady dealings with foreign businessmen. The reporting on the story was swept under the rug by mainstream media, declared a “Russian disinformation” scheme and censored by Facebook* and Twitter.”The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story” is based on redacted emails of employees of the social media site.
