What should you make of the mess of Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, the ‘Twitter Files,’ and Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Late Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi released “The Twitter Files,” a batch of emails sent by Twitter executives discussing the company’s decision to stop an October 2020 New York Post story in its online tracks.
What is in the Twitter Files? Are they truly “bombshell” documents, as the New York Post and Fox News call them? Or are they “not really the smoking gun,” as a Post columnist admitted? Read on.
In October 2020, three weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, The New York Post published an exclusive, possibly explosive story: Biden’s Secret Emails: Ukrainian exec thanked Hunter Biden for ‘opportunity to meet’ veep dad. The story purported to report the contents of a laptop brought to the tabloid by the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop, who said it had belonged to, and been abandoned by, President Biden’s second son, Hunter Biden. Emails and files found on the laptop revealed how Hunter had peddled influence with Ukranian businessmen, the Post claimed –and also included “a raunchy, 12-minute video” showing Hunter smoking crack and having sex.
After the Post story was published, Twitter barred anyone from tweeting a link to it or sending it via direct message, labeling it “hacked material.” The company also suspended the Post’s account for multiple days, preventing it from tweeting further.
Why? Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said in an interview this week that Twitter could not verify the story, implying he and others at the company did not trust the Post.
It has rarely, if ever, been part of Twitter’s stated purpose to verify news stories. This exception appeared to be an intentional interference in the political process. This story in particular was especially hard to verify because the people who claimed to have found the laptop refused to give it to outlets other than the Post, so other newspapers couldn’t confirm the Post’s conclusion. (Much of the story, including parts about Hunter’s controversial business dealings in Ukraine and China, would be confirmed nearly two years later.)
“Everything about it looked like a hack and leak,” Roth said.
Twitter’s decision to bury the story became a scandal on the political right, and new Twitter CEO Elon Musk had promised an accounting of Twitter’s controversial decision. Enter: The Twitter Files, named in the fashion of a Facebook whistleblower’s leaked documents.
Musk first teased the release late in the day on Friday afternoon, promising exclusive details of “what really happened” with Hunter Biden. “This will be awesome,” he promised, punctuating the tweet with a popcorn emoji.
Three hours later, journalist Matt Taibbi kicked off a long thread of more than three dozen tweets, based on internal Twitter documents, that revealed what he described as “a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.”
To Musk, this release clears a dark cloud hanging over Twitter as he works to mold Twitter in his image, cleansing and redirecting both its public perception and internal culture. It is possible that the CEO himself handed the documents to Taibbi, but we do not know for sure. Musk did hype the document dump ahead of and during its publication, but Taibbi cited only “internal sources.”
In the thread, Taibbi shares screenshots from emails showing Twitter execs discussing the Post story and making efforts to block its distribution on the social network. The emails, Taibbi says, show the “extraordinary steps” Twitter took “ to suppress the story.”
The most damning quote within the Files comes from an executive who discussed the decision as it unfolded, Twitter communications chief Brandon Borrman. He asked in an email, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” The story was so outlandish as to seem impossible. It seemed it could not have arisen from anything but a hack… or could it? And could Twitter, which ex-CEO Dick Costolo called “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” defend censoring a news story, whatever its provenance?
Much of the reaction to the Twitter Files–especially from the company’s critics on the right–says the bombshell is proof that Twitter acted at the behest of Democrats.
