On the night from Friday to Saturday December 3 (Italian time), the podcaster Matthew Colin Taibbi (Matt Taibbi) published a long thread to say how Twitter allegedly covered up related scandals Hunter Bidenthe son of the current President of the United States Joe Biden. A “revelation” that would have been allowed thanks to the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, who also announced the “scoop” with great vigour. In fact, it was information that was already partially known, as the former Twitter CEO announced in 2020. Jack Dorsey. In addition, the story does not indicate what specific content consisted of that was “covered up” by the social network’s internal moderation. If we were to propose an extreme and simplified synthesis: Elon Musk buys Twitter, provides a journalist with internal staff emails to create an interesting story to be published exclusively on his own platform in favor of Republican politics.
Matt Taibbi claims the release will be the first chapter in a series of events based on “thousands of internal documents obtained from Twitter.” In the thread, he posts some screenshots of internal communications indicating the content that needs intervention, paying particular attention to censoring the names and emails of the employees involved to ensure their anonymity. However, there is a problem, because Taibbi himself writes and disseminates the identity of an employee (Tweet #20) who closed her Twitter account the following the wave of hate and the death threats received a thank you to this thread.
the context
In 2020, in the midst of the election campaign for the presidency of the United States of America, the story of a computer attributed to Hunter Biden was delivered to a technical support workshop Wilmingtonin which Delaware. The New York Post’s source, who is said to have shared the content, was Donald Trump’s then-confident attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who gave the US newspaper (not to be confused with the New York Times) a floppy disk with some of the likely dates to come presented by laptops. According to the reconstructions, the disc was supplied to Giuliani by far-right propagandist Steve Bannon. Where is the record originally from? From the Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, without any permission. However, he would be considered the rightful owner of the content since the computer material had not been recovered from the customer after a certain period of time.
This content was used to discredit the rival candidate in the US presidency, Joe Biden. According to the New York Post’s “Scoop,” Hunter Biden is said to be implicated in a corruption deal with a Ukrainian businessman (who Burisma case) and not only. At this time, the contents of the disc have revealed no wrongdoing by Joe Biden. A forensic analysis of a copy of the disk provided by Republican Jack Maxey, conducted by two analysts on behalf of The Washington Post, revealed that multiple third-party content (not Hunter Biden) had been inserted before and after the alleged “jump of the New York Post Analysts have identified this content in folders named “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter Burisma Documents.” Other investigations, such as that by the Distributed Denial of Secrets group, claim that some of the emails on the hard drive have been tampered with and that some were allegedly created in August 2020, a year after the laptop was shipped.
After the story broke, the New York Post articles were blocked by the Twitter platform. Days later, as an article in the New York Times recalls, the blockade was lifted.
The New York Post story: It’s nothing new
It focuses on two 2020 New York Post articles about Hunter Biden’s computer that were blocked on Twitter from being shared via tweet or private message. But this is by no means new. Then-CEO Jack Dorsey had posted (on October 15, 2020) a tweet in which he criticized the decisions reported in a thread the official Twitter Safety Account. Jack himself described the action as “unacceptable”.
The disputed and related violations are reported in the thread personal and private contentas well as in relation to the dissemination of illegally acquired materials. In one of the tweets, the Twitter account Safety explains that the Social media policy introduced in 2018 prohibits the use of the platform to distribute content obtained without permission and declares its intention not to “incite” “hacking” to distribute illegally obtained material.
The next day, October 16, 2020, Jack Dorsey posts a new tweet where it stated that blocking links directly was wrong, but that they updated the policy to fix the issue and allow users to get more context about the content. As the New York Times recalls, the blockade was lifted.
The New York Post knew everything, it was nothing new. And in 2021, he published an article titled, “Jack Dorsey says blocking Hunter Biden story in the Post was a ‘total mistake’ — but won’t say who did it,” d Biden was a” “Total mistake,” but he won’t say who did it.” In short, the controversial US newspaper recalls Jack Dorsey’s self-criticism of what happened at the time, but denies that it failed to identify the perpetrators of the blockade. As we shall see , Matt Taibbi, with the help of Elon Musk, will reveal the names and put under the media pillory the name of an employee who would not have had decision-making responsibility.
Removed pornographic content from Twitter
In which Tweet #8 of the thread, Taibbi shows a list of tweets flagged for submission to the moderation team by a “Biden team” on October 24, 2020.
The reported tweets have all been removed, and Taibbi himself does not explain their content. Through a search we manage to retrieve the one posted by user @GuySquiggs October 24, 2020: a 2017 photo of Hunter Biden showing off his penis while another person stands behind him on the patio. The user asks how old is this person who is present in the recording along with Hunter Biden, which most likely introduces the topic of pedophilia. Material that could be classified as “revenge porn”.
In which Tweet #9, Taibbi posts another screenshot with two more links. Here is the content of what we found published on October 24, 2020 from the @stephen_liuhuan account, which links to images of Hunter Biden using drugs and images of a sexual nature.
What Taibbi and Musk reveal about the Trump administration
If the story of the blocking of two New York Post articles is nothing new, what else does Matt Taibbi’s thread deliver? Nothing significant compared to what was already known, except for an internal and until yesterday private correspondence between employees and management on the case that revealed their initially undisclosed identities. However, the story brings to light a different reality that has been confirmed by both Taibbi and Musk.
In which Tweet #10Taibbi claims that both Democrats and Republicans (from the White House) have submitted requests to speak on the platform and publicly confirmed that both have been accepted.
Oddly enough, this tweet from Matt Taibbi would confirm this an admission by Elon Musk, who comments on the thread: Twitter allegedly “acted on behalf of the American government to suppress freedom of expression without judicial intervention”. The story Taibbi tells in the thread concerns the month of October 2020, actually events prior to the US election of November 3, 2020. The incumbent administration was that of Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.
On the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Matt Taibbi (in Tweet #22) that there is no evidence of government involvement.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump’s US administration is involved in the laptop affair, as Taibbi claims. However, with Tweet 10 he confirms that the government has interacted with the platform to intervene in content and would thus confirm Musk’s statement in which he emphasizes that the American government intervened to “suppress freedom of expression”.
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