Two years after that fact, Elon Musk — Twitter’s new mega-owner — promoted the release of documents showing the company’s internal deliberations about banning the New York Post account over its reporting on Hunter Biden.
The new disclosures, described as “Twitter files,” were Posted in a long thread on Twitter By investigative reporter and author Matt Tibi (ur Retweeted by Musk). It’s based on “thousands of internal documents obtained by sources on Twitter,” according to Tibi — shared with him, apparently with the blessing of Musk, the conservative tech mogul who is the richest person in the world.
In October 2020, a few weeks before the US presidential election, Twitter froze the New York Post account for 16 days after the paper published a series of stories alleging that Joe Biden and his son Hunter had been involved in corrupt business dealings in Ukraine and China. . Twitter initially said the newspaper violated its “hacked material” policy, blocking the publication of URLs for the first article, since the newspaper’s source for Biden opponents was information provided by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a MacBook Pro belonging to Hunter Biden.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to block the story, removing links and posting warnings that it might be ‘unsafe,'” Tayeb wrote. “They even blocked transmission of it via Direct Messages, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, such as child pornography.”
According to Tibi, the decision to withhold Biden’s original story “was taken at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former chief legal, policy and trust Vijaya Jade playing a key role.”
Twitter executives knew backlash would erupt over the decision to block Hunter Biden’s article in the Post, according to Taibbi, and there was debate about how to proceed. Trenton Kennedy, Twitter’s director of US policy communications, wrote in an internal email, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for flagging this as unsafe.” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity (who just resigned last month in the wake of Musk’s takeover), responded that “the policy is based on hacked material — though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear.” Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker said that while Twitter needed more information about the situation, it was “reasonable for us to assume” that the material that formed the basis for The Washington Post’s reporting had been hacked, writing that “caution is required.”
Twitter later reversed the decision, saying it had updated its hacked material policy and would not apply it retroactively to the New York Post. other news outlets, Including The New York Times, since then stated that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden and that the documents on it were original. Predictably, Twitter’s blocking of mail has become a rallying point for Republican politicians who accuse the social network of censoring conservative views.
Two days after Twitter blocked the Post’s original Biden story, Dorsey issued legal responsibility for the company’s actions in connection with Post’s story. “The direct URL blocking was wrong, and we’ve updated our policy and app to fix it,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet at the time. “Our goal is to try to add context, and now we have the capabilities to do that.”
Per Taibbi’s topic, “The surprising subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop case was how much was accomplished without CEO Jack Dorsey’s knowledge, and how long it took for the situation to become ‘unoccupied’ (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.” “. He also wrote, “There are multiple instances in Dorsey’s files in which she enters into questioning suspensions and other moderation measures, to accounts across the political spectrum.”
In April 2022, shortly thereafter Signing the Twitter purchase agreement For $44 billion, Musk criticized Twitter’s decision to block the New York Post over Biden’s stories. “Suspending a major news organization’s Twitter account for publishing a true story was clearly incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote on Twitter. the next day Post a meme With images of Vijaya Jade – who at the time was Twitter’s head of legal, policy, trust and safety – pokes fun at the social network’s alleged “left bias”.
Musk fired Gadde the day he closed the Twitter acquisition along with CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and general counsel Sean Edgett.
Musk, who describes himself as an “absolute freedom of speech,” has complained that Twitter has been censored in the past and that he would make Twitter adhere to strict principles of “free speech” — a stance that critics fear will lead to an increase in misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
Last month, Musk decided to restore the Twitter account of Donald Trump, which was banned in 2021 due to its support for the January 6 rioters who attacked the US Capitol. Additionally, Musk has announced that Twitter is giving “amnesties” to suspended accounts and reinstatement (“provided they don’t break the law or engage in egregious spam”) — including Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglinfounder of the white supremacist website Daily Stormer, which Twitter banned in 2013. However, on Thursday Musk banned Kanye West after the rapper tweeted an image of a Nazi swastika inside a Jewish star.
According to Tibi, both Democrats and Republicans had access to Twitter tools to request review and removal of certain tweets. In 2020, he said, Twitter received requests from both the White House and the Biden campaign.
But Democrats have “more channels, more ways to complain” than conservatives about tweets because “Twitter was and still is overwhelmingly powered by people of one political orientation,” according to Tibi, namely the left-leaning. This led to “skewed content moderation decisions,” he wrote, which he said were supported by Twitter documents and “several high-level current and former executives.”
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