Elon Musk's Twitter Files Dump
by Peter Schweizer • December 13, 2022 at 5:00 am
It was not "Russian disinformation." Nor was it "unsafe." The executives running Twitter in the twenty days before the 2020 presidential election clearly knew that, and tried to find other justifications for what amounted to raw censorship.
Twitter's bias in censoring or banning conservative accounts for "hate speech" while happily servicing accounts for the Iranian ayatollah and the Taliban is a running joke. In a series of secretly recorded interviews with Twitter employees, Project Veritas had already confirmed that "shadow-banning," manipulating the number of followers shown by certain accounts, and selectively "de-boosting" certain tweets in its algorithms was a well-established, standard manipulation of the platform's stated purpose: "We serve the public conversation. That's why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk."
Kudos to Khanna for his lonely but principled stand for free speech. Taibbi also noted in his thread that Khanna was the only Democratic official to do so.
China's enticements to the Biden family are but one example of this campaign. We learned through this research how insidious and effective the Chinese government has been at co-opting not just the families of senior elected officials, but captains of industry, financial behemoths, and the wealthiest American philanthropists and educational institutions.
The Biden story also showed the ingenuity of corrupt politicians who essentially "outsource" their corruption to family members rather than risk a possible paper trail leading back to themselves. The Bidens, even more than Bill and Hillary Clinton before them, were a family influence business.
We have all learned about other stories of political interference and foot-dragging within the FBI. The public is right to wonder whether federal prosecutors are as serious about pursuing this case as Twitter's Democratic partisans were in squelching it.
Further, President Biden's Attorney General, Merrick Garland, continues to task the bureau with investigating the Jan. 6 riots as a deep conspiracy, while simultaneously ignoring what certainly appear to have been well-organized efforts by Antifa to foment violence during the George Floyd riots, and violence done by pro-abortion organizations after someone on Twitter publicized the home addresses of Supreme Court justices.
For more than two critical weeks, under secret pressure from the Biden campaign and Democrats who were desperate to bury a devastating story that implicated their presidential candidate in his son's corruption by Chinese intelligence-connected businessmen. The Post's story was factually accurate, legitimately reported, and was (belatedly) authenticated by other news outlets. In short, there was no reason to do what Twitter, Roth, and Gadde did, other than pleasing a political party with whom they agreed.
Elon Musk's release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post's blockbuster "Hunter Biden laptop" story merely confirms what most knew already -- that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.
In a Tweet thread on Dec. 2, journalist Matt Taibbi exposes the smoking gun -- the frantic attempts to claim without evidence that any reference to the NY Post's story had to be banned from the platform because it might have come from "hacked materials." This, we can see now, was never seriously believed, even inside Twitter, as the email exchanges make clear.