( Post Millennial )
Elon Musk announced on Friday that that "What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!" And then he spilled the tea.
The thread reads:
"What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
"The 'Twitter Files' tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
"Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
"In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.
"Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly."
On Wednesday, Musk revealed that Twitter has interfered with elections. It was in response to a report from Reuters about Twitter's move to free speech under Musk, he replied that "The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections. Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed."
In October 2020, in the lead up to the general presidential election in the US, Emma Jo Morris broke the story in the New York Post of a discarded laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop. That laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and on it, a treasure trove of explicit material was found. But what Morris wrote about was the evidence contained on that laptop that pointed to the Biden famliy having engaged in influence peddling as well as shady international business dealings.
The story was suppressed and censored by social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, both outlets assuming that the information was false. The reason they believed it to be false, then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, was because they had been contacted by agents with the FBI who said the platforms should be on the lookout for a so-called misinformation dump. When the laptop story broke, the platforms assumed that was it, and censored the story.
Those with the Biden campaign called it "Russian disinformation," but the laptop was very real. The younger Biden had dropped the computer off at a Delaware repair shop and simply never came to pick it up. The repair shop, per their policy, takes possession of materials that are left in their possession for more than 90 days. The owner of the shop realized the potential bombshell he had on his hands, and managed to get the laptop to Rudy Giuliani.
Twitter claimed that they believed the data revealed by Morris and the Post had been hacked— it wasn't. But under their terms of service, hacked material is not allowed on the platform. The New York Post's Twitter account was locked, and many media outlets, from NPR to The New York Times to the Washington Post all issued explainers to readers as to why they refused to cover the story rather than actually cover the story. CBS only just admitted that it was real.
After the presidential election, in which the winning votes went to Joe Biden, it was revealed that nothing about the story was false, hacked, or misinformation, and that the social media platforms, which essentially operate as the American newsstand, had censored information that was essential for the American public. Polls after the election showed that many Americans would likely not have voted for Biden had they known about the contents of the laptop.
Dorsey and Zuckerberg had to go before Congress and apologize to the American people for what they had done, which each of them assumed was in the best interests of the nation, the American elections, and their platforms.