Free-speech Elon Musk is not happy with Twitter’s years-old decision to suppress a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election. So in an effort to restore public trust in Twitter, Elon Musk indicated last month that he would release internal communications showing how it all went down.
This came after journalist Matt Tabby took two full hours to complete a long and tediously slow tweet thread on Friday night, which was coordinated by Elon Musk to leak the documents and post his findings on Twitter.
Tibby later deleted a tweet that showed Jack Dorsey’s email address. Tibbie’s thread included screenshots of emails between members of the Biden campaign and foreign policy leaders led by Twitter. At one point, there is even a confidential communication from the Deputy General Counsel of Twitter.
The emails reveal that Twitter’s team is struggling to handle the New York Post story that broke the news of Hunter’s leaked laptop files and whether they made the right moderation decision in the first place.
Twitter decided to ban links or images from the post’s story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked content. and with supporters of free speech over Twitter’s decision to block the news outlet, mainly among Republicans.
Elon Musk must be hoping the communication shows a team mostly strict restraint when it comes to documents revealing that Twitter employees decided to act nefariously to help now-President Joe Biden .
I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe, wrote a former communications employee. Will we also mark similar stories as unsafe? another asked.
Joel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety at the time, said the company decided to err on the side of caution given the serious risks here and the lessons of 2016. Twitter Deputy General Manager Jim Baker agreed that it is reasonable for us to assume that they [hacks] could have happened and that precautions are needed. Elon Musk says this is evidence of government interference but it clearly isn’t.
The emails don’t show how the initial decision was made — just subsequent emails in which leaders on Twitter discussed whether it was the right choice. Taibbi reports that Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter’s CEO at the time, was not aware of the decision.
Elon Musk reads the incidents as government interference. If this is not a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, what is? But the emails show that the Biden campaign, which is not a government entity, is flagging tweets for review at Twitter as part of its moderation policies ahead of the election.
There is no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story that I have seen, says Taibi. Meanwhile, Tabby’s handling of the emails assigned to him at Musk’s direction, though he only refers to a “source on Twitter”, exposes the personal email addresses of two high-profile politicians.
Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna included an email address belonging to Taibbi, identified as Dorsey’s, in a message sent in an article posted on Twitter to handle the story. criticized. Khanna’s personal Gmail address appears to be included in another email, in which Khanna criticized Twitter’s decision to block the post’s story as well.
The names of several Twitter employees were also revealed who were in communication about the moderation decision. While it is not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of publicly facing individuals or key decision makers, it does not describe all of the people named in the leaked communications.
Given Hunter’s enthusiasm for the laptop, the leaked material could make some of those people victims of harassment. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote tonight in apparent reference to the leak.