This is how the Hunter Biden laptop surpassing went down on Twitter.
On October 14, 2020, The New York Post published a bombshell article that exposed a trove of secret Biden emails. The emails were recovered from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer tech store.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust, had a “key role” in the suppression decision, according to Taibbi.
“The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role,” wrote journalist Matt Taibbi.
Twitter employees weren’t sure at first how they could suppress the story without being called out for censorship. After discussion where they first wanted to use the excuse of “hacked materials”, they landed on wanting to mark the post as “unsafe”.
“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 ex-employee added.
Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”
They weren’t able to call it hacked material because there is no official legal ruling on it but there was also no evidence to suggest it was “hacked material”.
Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman questioned the validity the breach in policy claim.
“Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked Borrman
One, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “More to review from the Biden team,” along with a list of tweets.
Another, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “An additional report from DNC,” an apparent reference to the Democratic National Committee.
By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
In response, someone wrote back, “handled these.”
Twitter gave immense power of control to political parties where celebrities and unknown accounts both could be deleted or reviewed at the behest of political a party.
Taibbi also tweeted: “Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.”
But the former Rolling Stone writer said the “system wasn’t balanced” and “was based on contacts”
“Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” he wrote.
When The Post initially revealed the trove of emails found on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook responded against it with extreme censorship.
Due to unfounded claims that the article used hacked information, the platform prohibited users from sharing it and also blocked The Post’s access to its Twitter account for more than two weeks.
According to Tabbi, Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, they didn’t just manipulate user feeds and delete posts, they also dove into moderating Twitter users direct messages which are private conversations between individual users that aren’t seen publicly.
