The Twitter Files, Explained

US federal agencies worked closely with Twitter moderators to clamp down on what they saw as “disinformation” during the 2020 election. Executives went to great lengths to scrub certain content they deemed false and dangerous, following increasingly frequent sit-downs with law enforcement and intelligence orgs, according to the third installment of the “Twitter Files.”
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.
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.
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.”
Amongst the trove of files includes messages from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, revealing he was running out of “generic” names to disguise his increasingly regular meetings with federal officials ahead of the 2020 election in the company calendar.

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://freedomreportage.com/2022/12/12/the-twitter-files-explained/

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