When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the Left went into a major tailspin when Mr. Musk suggested making Twitter more free speech friendly – even though Mr. Musk could hardly be
thought of as conservative – perhaps a libertarian disruptor, but certainly not a movement conservative.
Now, the Left is in another Musk-inspired moment of mass hysteria as journalist Matt Taibbi, apparently directed by Elon Musk, has released a long Twitter “thread” citing Twitter company emails which show how the website colluded with political actors to censor sensitive information in the run up to the 2020 election.
The Spectator World’s Freddy Gray observed the most shocking document is this one asking for the Hunter Biden laptop story to be quashed:
What that message suggests, wrote Gray, is that Joe Biden’s campaign would flag content it didn’t approve of, and Twitter would simply “handle” — i.e., suppress — it.
"Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. 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," Taibbi wrote, according to reporting by Joseph A. Wulfsohn of FOX News. "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.'"
As Taibbi relates, Twitter treated the Hunter Biden laptop story as if it were child pornography — even blocking transmission via direct message. They also locked down the account of the then-White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany because she tweeted the story.
Here’s a link to the entire thread, which had over 300,000 likes the last time we looked.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Taibbi’s revelations is that they aren’t that surprising. Everybody knew that Twitter covered up a story that may have harmed Joe Biden. It’s just now we can see the evidence — and for that we should thank Twitter’s unorthodox new owner, concluded Mr. Gray.
Ah, but there’s as much “evidence” revealed in the reactions to Mr. Taibbi’s thread as there is in the actual thread.
And the most compelling is the lockstep, lemming-like reaction of the Leftwing activists who inhabit America’s newsrooms – they almost all attacked him for “doing PR for the world’s richest man.”
Here’s a link to a good collection compiled by Mediaite.com
No establishment “journalist” that we found scrolling through thousands of comments rebutted Matt Taibbi’s reporting, they all merely attacked Taibbi and Elon Musk for what?
Telling the truth.
So, we get so-called journalists like MSNBC and NBC reporter Mehedi Hasan (who used to work for Al Jazeera the jihadi-sympathizing online news site) saying:
And Chicago-based Far Left activist posing as a journalist Elias Cepeda opining:
But not one of them say Taibbi has his facts wrong, or Elon Musk is lying or phonied-up the material upon which the tweet thread story was based.
Now, here’s another interesting revelation.
"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. However… This system wasn't balanced," Taibbi wrote. "It 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."
"The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives," Taibbi wrote.
Now, here's another shocking - not shocking revelation from Matt Taibbi, "there’s no evidence - that I've seen" that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story but that "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."
"'They just freelanced it,' is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘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,’" Taibbi wrote, according to Mr. Wulfsohn’s reporting.
The implication of the statement “they just freelanced it” is that Leftwing Twitter executives killed the Hunter Biden laptop story simply because they could – they had the power to use assets owned by their employer’s shareholders to advance their own personal political agenda and they used it – without even informing the CEO of the company.
Democrats and their Far Left media allies are going nuts over the revelations in Matt Taibbi’s reporting, but they aren’t claiming it is not true. Conservatives have long suspected that Silicon Valley was manipulating search results and quashing stories at the behest of Democrats, what this first document dump by Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi appears to show that Democrats didn’t even have to ask – they already had high-level operatives at the top of Twitter who knew what to do to help Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump and they did it without any prompting.
“Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is,” Musk said in a tweet late Friday. So far, the Twitter files released to Matt Taibbi are a little unclear on which government officials in what branch asked for the Hunter Biden laptop story to be quashed. However, Musk replied to Taibbi’s tweet with the word “Handled” followed by three “fire” emojis. He later responded to his own post with the statement: “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”
It appears to us the next step is to identify and expose exactly which government officials were putting pressure on Twitter to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story and other material unfavorable to Democrats.
Elon Musk
Free Speech
Twitter
First Amendment
Donald Trump reinstated
Matt Taibbi
Hunter Biden laptop story
2020 election
Joe Biden campaign
Vijaya Gadde
CEO Jack Dorsey
speech suppression
Big Tech speech suppression