An independent journalist was given the scoop of a lifetime: Actual documents showing Twitter executives meddled in the 2020 presidential election.
Matt Taibbi released on Twitter what Elon Musk has called “The Twitter Files” on Friday, showing how Twitter suppressed a major story by the New York Post in 2020, which connected now-President Joe Biden with officials from a Ukrainian gas company. The executive of the gas company Burisma thanked Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for “giving me the opportunity to meet your father.” The meeting was arranged when Biden was still vice president to Barack Obama.
Taibbi on Friday evening wrote on Twitter about an email that shows Twitter’s trust and safety team decided to suppress the story before the election because it violated the company’s policy for sharing “hacked material.”
Yet there was no basis for determining the material actually qualified as hacked. It was simply the decision of a small group of executives who shared similar partisan political viewpoints and who, it can be now proven, were intentionally interfering in the 2020 election by suppressing damaging material on the Biden connection to Ukraine and influence peddling by Hunter Biden, who was paid about $11 million by the Ukrainian company, as he served as a “board member” of the company.
Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust, Viyaja Gadde, is said to have played a key role in suppressing the story. Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is, so far, cleared of involvement.
The New York Post, in writing about the revelation, said that Twitter executives “just freelanced their baseless decision to censor The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop scoop in the run up to the 2020 election — with top-level workers at the social media giant agreeing that controversial decision was “f–ked,” damning insider communications released by CEO Elon Musk Friday reveal.”
Musk tweeted a link to the account of Taibbi, who had started tweeting a series of proofs that Twitter executives had interfered in the elections by suppressing news.
Emails and comments from former Twitter employees showed that “everyone knew” the social media giant’s suppression of The Post’s scoops about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, The New York Post wrote.
It was a story that, in 2020, other mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post discredited and called “Russian disinformation.” But earlier this year, both newspapers changed their tune and admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story was legitimate. By then, Joe Biden had been president for more than a year.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the New York Times was especially dismissive.
“President Trump’s allies have promoted claims of corruption aimed at the former vice president’s son in an effort to damage the Biden campaign,” the New York Times wrote in October of 2020.
“President Trump’s allies have long promoted claims of corruption about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter in a bid to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign. The accusations intensified in recent days when some of Mr. Trump’s associates, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, provided material for a New York Post article detailing some of the allegations. The Post reported that the F.B.I. had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden,” the New York Times wrote.
“The Biden campaign has rejected the accusations. Many questions remain about the origins of the allegations themselves, the laptop and what, if anything, agents are investigating,” the newspaper continued.
“The Post article relied on documents purportedly taken from the computer to try to buttress an unsubstantiated argument peddled by Mr. Giuliani and other Trump supporters: that as vice president, Mr. Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son. The events are the latest chapter in a more than two-year effort by the president and his allies to uncover damning information about the Bidens, a pursuit that also helped prompt Mr. Trump’s impeachment,” the New York Times printed, in an effort to discredit the damaging information.
“Mr. Biden has long said he knew nothing about his son’s business activities in Ukraine. But the article suggested that the former vice president met with an adviser to a Ukrainian energy company whose board Hunter Biden sat on, Burisma Holdings. The article referred to an email that the adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi, sent to Hunter Biden thanking him for ‘giving an opportunity to meet your father’”’ and to spend ‘“’some time together.'”
Between the New York Times and Washington Post, a concerted effort to discredit the story ramped up, and Twitter suppressed the story at the request of Democrat operatives.
Twitter even resorted to a seldom-used tactic of blocking the sharing of links to the New York Post story via direct message, a tool usually only used in “extreme cases,” such as to stop the distribution of child pornography, according to Taibbi.
More about this story at the New York Post.
