As he is known to do, Elon Musk once again promised something and failed to deliver.
This time, Twitter’s owner and champion of the “de facto public town square” teased a bombshell of a story: “What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter” and said, complete with a popcorn emoji, that “This will be awesome.”
Twitter Files was supposed to be a smoking gun, an uncovering of the sins of pre-Musk Twitter, that in Musk’s head would “tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms,” to quote the first installment’s author, Substack writer Matt Taibbi.
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It did not. Instead, Twitter Files was a two-hour-long snoozefest that didn’t do much but dox former Twitter employees who are now being harassed by the online mob and share the email addresses of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Congressman Ro Khanna.
Musk had wanted to show proof of government meddling in Twitter, to highlight that at some point there was a “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.”
Instead, Musk and Taibbi only managed to show a series of snippets of how the employees on Twitter’s legal, policy and communications teams debated the handling of the New York Post’s publication of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop shortly before the 2020 presidential election — information which mostly just corroborates what’s already been said about the incident.
Dorsey, who Taibbi points out was not involved in the decision to suppress the news story, told lawmakers at a 2021 hearing that the company’s handling of the story was “a total mistake.”
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“It was not to do with the content, it was to do with the hacked materials policy,” Dorsey explained at the 2021 hearing. “We had the incorrect interpretation. We don’t write policy according to any particular political leaning. If we find any of it, we write it out.”
Meanwhile, Yoel Roth, who until he resigned last month was the company’s head of trust and safety, also said as much in a recent interview with The Daily Beast.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke,” Roth said. “Everything about it looked like a hack and leak,” much like the Russian intelligence hack in the 2016 presidential election.
Contrary to what Musk was insisting, Taibbi also made it clear that he found “no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
On a buggy Twitter Spaces audio chat on Saturday afternoon, Musk criticized the media’s coverage of Twitter Files. “Rather than admit they lied to the public they’re trying to pretend this is a nothingburger,” he said. “Shame on them.”
But he also acknowledged that they “should have excluded some email addresses.” As usual, too, he’s undeterred and invited people to tune in to episode 2.
Information for this briefing was found via Twitter, CNN, The Verge, Washington Post, and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
