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Twitter Files: Or, Finally, The True Story Of How Twitter’s Sinister Team Covered Up The Hunter Biden Scandal

1 year ago babelfish

The story that emerged tonight, with the blessing of the new course of Twitter, wanted by Elon Musk, is the practical explanation of how the leftist leadership, led by circles of the Dems, censored the true stories of the scandals connected to the son of the president Biden, Hunter Biden, and emerged after one of his compromising computers was taken in for maintenance never repaired.

The story, with emails of obscure work reports and photos of parties, is already hot in itself, but equally, indeed even more scandalous, was the voluntary censorship applied by social media to prevent it from spreading to the public, with accusations of fake news that turned out to be false and tendentious.

Blogger and writer Matt Taibbi, with Musk's blessing, posted a long thread with each step of the story

Here is a translation of the Thread:

1. THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you are about to read is the first installment in a series, based on thousands of internal documents obtained from Twitter sources.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world's largest and most influential social media platforms. It is the Frankensteinian tale of a man-made mechanism that escaped the control of its designer.

4. Twitter, in its original conception, was a brilliant tool for enabling instantaneous mass communication, making true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In its early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission: to give people "the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers."

6. As time went on, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first language control tools were designed to combat spam and financial fraud.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders also started asking the company to manipulate the language: first a little, then more often, then consistently.

8. In 2020, requests for deletion of tweets from connected parties were now a routine. One executive wrote to another, “More to review from the Biden team.” The answer would have been: “Managed”.

9. Celebrities and strangers could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

10. Both parties had access to these tools. For example, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and granted in 2020. However:

11. This system was not balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly composed of people of a single political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.

12. The resulting political bias in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you are about to read. However, it is also the assessment of several current and former senior executives.

… Ok, there have been other discussions about the process, but never mind, let's move on.

16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked Hunter Biden's Laptop Story

17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an investigation based on the contents of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop:

18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it could be "unsafe." They have even blocked transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, such as child pornography.

19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was blocked from her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who railed: "At least pretend you care about the next 20 days".

2 0. This prompted public policy executive Caroline Strom to send in a polite WTF request. Several employees noted that there was tension between the communications/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the security/trust verification teams:

21. Strom's memo returned the response that the laptop history was removed for violating the company's "infringed materials" policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190717143909/https://help.twitter .com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials.

22. Although several sources recalled hearing of a “blanket” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacking, there is no evidence — that I have seen — of government involvement in the story of the laptop. In fact, that may have been the problem…

23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trustee Vijaya Gadde playing a key role. we know who is the key manager) .

24. “They did it themselves,” is how one former employee described the decision. “The excuse was hacking, but within hours almost everyone realized it wasn't going to hold up. But no one had the courage to change things”.

25. You can see the confusion in the lengthy exchange that follows, which ends up involving Gadde and former Trust and Security chief Yoel Roth. Communications official Trenton Kennedy writes, "I'm having a hard time understanding the political basis for marking this as unsafe":

26. At this point “everyone knew it was bullshit,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to get it wrong… keep getting it wrong.

27. Former global communications vice president Brandon Borrman asks: "Can we honestly say that this is part of the policy?"

28. Former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker appears to be advising again against going the route, because “caution is warranted”:

29. A fundamental problem of technology companies and content moderation: many people who deal with speech know or care little about speech, and have to get the basics explained by outsiders. To be clear:

30. In a humorous exchange on the first day, Democrat MP Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to suggest that she get on the phone to talk about "backlash re speech". Khanna is the only Democrat official I found in the files who expressed concern.

31. Gadde responds quickly, immediately diving into Twitter politics, ignoring that Khanna is more concerned about the Bill of Rights:

32.Khanna tries to hijack the conversation about the First Amendment, which is usually hard to find mention in the files (NtD the first amendment protects free speech):

33. Within a day, public policy officer Lauren Culbertson receives a horrific letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, who had already polled 12 congressmen – 9 congressmen and 3 Democrats, from the “Judiciary Committee of the Room in Rep. Judy Chu's office."

34. NetChoice says Twitter faces a “bloodbath” in upcoming congressional hearings, with members saying it's a “game changer,” lamenting that the technology has “grown so much that it can't not even to regulate itself, so government intervention may be needed”.

35. Szabo reports on Twitter that some Hill exponents are characterizing the laptop story as “tech's Access Hollywood moment”:

36. Twitter Files Continue: “ THE FIRST AMENDMENT IS NOT ABSOLUTE”

Szabo's letter contains chilling passages reporting the attitudes of Democratic lawmakers. They want "more" restraint, and as far as the Bill of Rights is concerned, it "is not absolute". (NdT therefore Twitter, on behalf of Dem politicians, assumes the power to censor content according to its own will) .

37. A surprising subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much it was done behind CEO Jack Dorsey's back and how long it took for the situation to "unblock" (as one former employee put it) even after Dorsey intervened.

38. While going through Gadde's emails, I saw a familiar name: mine. Dorsey sent her a copy of my article on Substack exposing the incident.

39. In the files are several instances where Dorsey has stepped in to question suspensions and other restraint actions, for accounts across the political spectrum.

40. The problem with the "hacked material" ruling, several sources said, is that it usually requires an official/police finding of a hack. But that assessment never appeared in what one executive describes as a "whirlwind" 24-hour chaos across the company.

41. It was a whirlwind 96 hours for me too. There's plenty more to know, including answers to questions about issues like shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more. These problems are not limited to the political right.

42. Goodnight everyone. Thanks to everyone who has answered the phone over the last few days.

So, at some point, through sheer political pressure, social media ceased to be information intermediaries, and became political players with censorship power, obviously leaning to one side. Sometimes it was not the founders who decided it, but politically compromised key intermediate figures.

Now we know how the game happened in the USA. Will we ever know how it happened in Italy instead? And will Elon Musk be able to remedy it? Or will something happen to prevent it?

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Minds

The article Twitter files: or, finally, the true story of how the “Sinistroso” team of Twitter covered up the Hunter Biden scandal comes from Economic Scenarios .

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/twitter-files-ovvero-finalmente-la-vera-storia-di-come-il-team-sinistroso-di-twitter-ha-nascosto-lo-scandalo-hunter-biden/ on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 12:35:01 +0000.