Since December 2022, new Twitter owner Elon Musk has been giving selected journalists access to the internal communications of Twitter from the past few years. They have revealed widespread collusion between Twitter executives and Democrats, intelligence agencies, and other government institutions, as well as the obvious bias against conservatives of most Twitter employees.
Among the prominent journalists who have published parts of the so-called “Twitter files” are Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Lee Fang.
This article intends to summarize the most important information that has been revealed through the Twitter Files so far. It deals with the following major issues:
- Censoring conservatives
- The Hunter Biden laptop story
- The banning of Donald Trump
- Twitter censoring true information about COVID shots and policy
- The FBI and government colluding with Twitter
- The media and government response
1. Censoring conservatives
The first batch of the Twitter files was published by independent journalist Matt Taibbi. It revealed that Twitter was censoring conservatives on behalf of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine,” Taibbi wrote. “One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled,’” Taibbi wrote. “Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party,” Taibbi continued, adding that while both Republicans and Democrats “had access to these tools” (he said that “in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored”) the “system wasn’t balanced.”
“It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” Taibbi said, confirming conservatives’ longtime contention that right-wing voices and entities are more regularly targeted on social media than their left-wing counterparts.
Moreover, an installment of the Twitter Files published by journalist Bari Weiss confirmed another suspicion of conservatives, namely that Twitter was “shadow-banning” certain accounts.
Among the most prominent accounts that were “blacklisted” — meaning that their reach was reduced without them knowing about it — was that of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration against the draconian COVID lockdowns. The two major conservative figures Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk were also blacklisted. These revelations stand in contradiction to statements made by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who testified to Congress in 2018 that “political viewpoints” were not considered by Twitter.
In addition, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said in 2018: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
2. The Hunter Biden laptop story
On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter censored the New York Post’s blockbuster story about the scandalous contents of a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The Twitter Files revealed that the FBI was working behind the scenes to prime Twitter executives to censor the factually accurate report.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” Taibbi wrote. “They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”
Initially, Twitter blocked the New York Post’s report for allegedly violating the platform’s “hacked materials” policy. However, that story quickly crumbled.
“Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” one former Twitter employee said, according to Taibbi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
It was also revealed that the FBI played a major role in Twitter’s suppression of
the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In a later installment of the Twitter files, Michael Shellenberger showed that the FBI “repeatedly primed head of Trust & Safety team Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation” and “Russian propaganda.”
Roth, a homosexual who has voiced support of minors using homosexual sex apps, revealed in a sworn declaration that the FBI specifically warned him about a potential “hack-and-leak operation” involving Hunter Biden, likely occurring in October 2020.
The FBI was purposefully deceiving Roth. The agency knew that the Hunter Biden laptop story was factually accurate because it seized the infamous laptop from a Delaware store owner back in December 2019, as Shellenberger reported.
Shellenberger said that former FBI lawyer James “Jim” Baker, who “repeatedly [and wrongly] insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both,” even sent an email to the FBI in December 2020, thanking it for its work.
Baker, who served as general counsel for the FBI until 2018, was Twitter’s deputy general counsel until the end of 2022. He acted as the main inside man from the FBI at Twitter, pushing the agency’s desired narratives at Twitter.
You can read more on Jim Baker in the section “5) The FBI and government colluding with Twitter.”
