Former U.S. President Donald Trump recently decried the “corrupt” Department of Justice (DOJ), saying it would do nothing about “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.”
On TruthSocial, Trump wrote, “Wow! That’s a really big story about Twitter and various forms of government Fraud, including, specifically, Election Fraud. The same level of Fraud took place with the other Big Tech companies, if not even worse (if that’s possible?).”
He continued, “We are living in a VERY CORRUPT COUNTRY &, AS THEY ARE SAYING ALL OVER THE INTERNET, ‘NOTHING WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT & FBI ARE TOTALLY CORRUPT.’ But they’ll keep investigation ‘boxes’ that were legally & openly taken from the W.H.”
Former President Trump’s post followed after journalist Matt Taibbi published the story. Twitter owner Elon Musk granted Taibbi exclusive access to documents held by the company.
The documents consist of several emails between Twitter executives and Democrat Party establishment individuals, pointing to possible cooperation between the two.
“The decision” to squelch the Hunter Biden laptop story “was made at the highest levels of the company,” wrote Taibbi. “But without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with the former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.”
One former employee characterized the decision by saying, “They just freelanced it,” said a former employee. “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.”
Twitter execs frantically worked to quash the laptop story
Taibbi’s Twitter thread showed executives at the social media company frantically working to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Taibbi added that one notable exception is California Democrat Representative Ro Khanna. “Khanna was the only Democratic official I could in the files who expressed concern.”
Khana wrote one exchange to Twitter’s top lawyer, Gadde, where Gadde thought it would be a discussion about censorship of the laptop story and was instead approached with concern by Khanna that Twitter censoring is a slippery slope for free speech.
“In the heat of a Presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if the N.Y. Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good,” wrote Khanna.
The day following the congressman’s changing his opinion, Lauren Culbertson Grieco, Twitter’s head of Public Policy, received a letter from Carl Szabo of NetChoice. Szabo, vice president of one of the most prominent Big Tech lobbying groups, expressed concern from some Democrats that there could be “more” oversight to block “conservatives” from “muddy[ing] the water.”
Szabo continued by writing, “The Democrats, meanwhile, complained that the companies are inept: They let conservatives muddy the water and make the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden is innocent. They linked this to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal: she did nothing wrong, but because the press wouldn’t let the story go, it became a scandal far out of proportion. In their mind, social media is doing the same thing: it doesn’t moderate enough harmful content, so when it does, like it did yesterday, it becomes a story. If the companies moderated more, conservatives wouldn’t even think to use social media for disinformation.”
“The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they’re corrupting democracy and making all ‘truth’ relative. When pushed on how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: ‘the First Amendment isn’t absolute.'”
Since the start of President Joe Biden’s term at the beginning of 2021, taxpayer money totaling $38.8 million has been issued in research grants to study censorship. The National Science Foundation has distributed the money.
“To ram the radical bias home,” wrote the Foundation for Freedom, “NSF grant explicitly says the goal of the funding is ‘to counter these populist narratives.’ That is, point blank, just the U.S. government using U.S. taxpayer funds to counter the social media opinions of half of the entire U.S. electorate.”
