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Over the weekend of Dec. 3, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk provided writer Matt Taibbi with a series of documents about internal discussions at the company about how to handle the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. The Post story was broken and censored on Twitter and Facebook on October 14, 2020, just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. It wasn’t just tweets or posts, even those who tried to send a story directly via messenger were censored.
Taibbi, in turn, reviewed the documents and posted the relevant ones on Twitter.
A liberal network of Twitter personalities and journalists then quickly went to work to deny that anything untoward had happened on Twitter. But there was definitely.
HUNTER BIDEN REVELATIONS IN TWITTER FILES MEDIA INSIDERS, CRITICS: ‘Sorry Episode’
First, Twitter worked closely with the Biden campaign to remove tweets the campaign deemed inappropriate. Biden’s team sends an email with the links and gets a response that says it’s been “developed.”
Hunter Biden’s book “beautiful things” was featured on CBS News and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (Book Gallery via AP)
((Gallery of Books via AP))
Did Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign receive similar support? Can people on Trump’s team email Twitter and remove inappropriate tweets about Trump or his family? If Eric or Don Jr.’s laptop had been exposed, does anyone believe that the light on that laptop would have been blacked out on social media? Of course not. And everyone knows it.
There’s an additional factor that the FBI has warned Twitter about when looking for information on Hunter Biden. How did they know the Hunter Biden story was coming? As Miranda Devine, who broke the story about the laptop in the New York Post notes, “Well, the FBI spied on then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud under the guise of an investigation into foreign agent registration violations, an investigation that was dropped this year.” Giuliani provided the materials on the laptop to the Post.
It was collusion between the Biden campaign, law enforcement and Twitter that Americans should care about. All of them promoted the lie that the laptop was some kind of Russian disinformation, not the drug-addled son of a presidential candidate who lost his personal property.
And the lie continues. Michael M. Greenbaum wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times that published the documents: “Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi saw the exchanges as evidence of career censorship and the pernicious influence of liberals. Many, even some hardliners on Twitter, critics were unimpressed, saying the exchange was simply a group of executives discussing how to deal with unconfirmed reports based on data from a stolen laptop.
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“Serious discussion” is a hilarious bias, but “stolen laptop” is really wrong. In fact, laptop repair expert John Paul McIsaac has a defamation case against several media outlets, including CNN and Politico, for using those “stolen” terms. Anyone who follows the story and doesn’t just try to deny it can tell.
For the left, it’s important that this story passes because it confirms what most Americans believe to be true: that both sides of the political aisle are not treated equally. In February 2021, Time magazine Molly Ball described a “well-funded group of powerful people from industries and ideologies working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, control media coverage. They controlled the flow of information.
Can the Conservatives similarly “consolidate” the election? Of course not. Can they change rules and laws, have Twitter delete tweets and censor unsavory information weeks before an election? Everyone knows the answer is no.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and as Musk documents it, with the promise of more to come, it’s good for all of us. Social media would do well to be fair to Republicans. But they are not, and Americans need to see and be aware of this obvious bias.
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