Thread by @warnerta

THE TWITTER FILES NOTHING BURGER :
How a dumbass far-right billionaire and a crappy former Moscow Exile reporter stumbled over themselves trying to invent a story that Twitter suppressed a big 2020 election scandal. 🧵

Tonight Elon Musk, the tech mogul who bought Twitter to welcome back neo-Nazis, and Matt Taibbi, the gonzo denouncer of "blood-sucking" bankers, published their joint project THE TWITTER FILES, which purports to expose a Democrat conspiracy to suppress a 2020 election scandal. /2

The story tries to make it look like Democrats inside and outside Twitter conspired to heavy-handedly suppress an important scandal just before the 2020 election, when the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were leaked to the media. Only, they ended up proving the opposite. /3

They start with what is meant to look like evidence that people working for then-candidate Joe Biden asked Twitter to delete tweets relating to the scandal. First, a screenshot of Twitter internal email indicating 5 tweets were deleted after complaints from "the Biden team." /4

And another screenshot of Twitter internal mail listing two more problem tweets, one of which was kicked up for further review because it was posted by actor James Wood. Taibbi though doesn't say anything yet about the contents of these tweets. /5

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

Taibbi moves on to suggesting the conspiracy. He admits "both parties had access" and "in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored." But the "system wasn't balanced" because Twitter staff donate mainly to D candidates: /6

This being gonzo reporting, the spreadsheet numbers don't add up. But no matter - Taibbi also provided the link where you can see the correct data, and that the general point is correct. /7 opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/s…

But does Twitter staff's strong favoring of Ds for donations prove they used their power over Twitter moderation in Ds' favor? You're not supposed to be thinking that hard. Musk and Taibbi want you to just swallow the insinuation and run with it. /8

And if that's not enough to convince you, check this out: Taibbi says "multiple" current or former Twitter executives think Twitter moderation was D-biased. That's more than one! Though none apparently wanted to commit by attaching their names. /9

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598830393360162817

Finally Taibbi introduces the scandal: the emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, published by the NY Post on Oct. 14, 2020. These seemed to suggest that the crooked company Hunter Biden worked for was trying to use him to reach his dad. /10

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831212310601728

Now I've been a harsh critic of Hunter's role in Ukraine since 2014. I think it's a fair point to make that Joe Biden failed to inspire ethics in his own son. But there was never evidence Joe Biden was himself corrupted, and the laptop emails didn't provide that either. /11

Even though the emails told what people already knew - that Hunter's a sleaze - most journalists were initially skeptical of them. They called to mind Russian leaks of Clinton emails in 2016. The chain of custody of Hunter's laptop was uncertain. What if they'd been altered? /12

Twitter was far from the only media institution where people thought the laptop story smelled fishy and didn't want to lend it credence in case the emails turned out to be fakes. Twitter's initial reaction was to consider the emails "hacked" and ban links to the Post story. /13

Taibbi tells the story breathlessly, but if you read the emails he includes for evidence, you see that very quickly Twitter executives were questioning whether they should lift the ban, and that the ban was becoming a bigger story than the emails. /14

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598834882414727168

This is perhaps of the most fake thing about the Musk-Taibbi story: they're not revealing anything important about Twitter's ban. Twitter's ban was a scandal at the time - and only inflated interest in Hunter's emails. Without the ban the Hunter scandal would have fizzled. /15

Taibbi makes it sound like Twitter stuck to the ban, but as the internal messages he posts shows, Twitter actually abandoned the ban and switched to instead adding a warning to shares of the story and reducing their priority in the newsfeed algorithm. /16

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598835411262279680

The best part of Taibbi's story is where he publishes the evidence that demolishes his own thesis: the California D congressman Ro Khanna messaging a Twitter exec to urge Twitter to relax and let the Hunter emails story be freely shared. /17

But what about those tweets that "the Biden team" complained about? Doesn't that show Biden interfering to suppress the scandal? Well, not exactly. Musk surely knew, and Taibbi probably knew that those tweets had nothing to do with Hunter's emails. /18

There was another scandal from Hunter's laptop: homemade porn videos that also showed him using drugs. This scandal didn't in any way involve Joe Biden, but it was enough of an embarrassment that his campaign apparently put time into alerting web sites hosting the porn. /19

The five tweets "the Biden team" complained about and the two mentioned in the other message Taibbi posted were all about the porn. Most included frames with visible genitalia. Five were Chinese. Here's the (redacted) image that James Wood (a really classy guy) posted. /20 end

PS Tim Miller on the Bulwark has a good piece on the topic. The irony is, Elon Musk's promotion of the story has been to fan fake outrage that "the Biden team" alerted Twitter to the tweets of Hunter porn, which in fact it's still Musk's policy to delete.

thebulwark.com/no-you-do-not-…

Here's Elon's tweet, posted in reply to fellow tech billionaire Michael Solana, who posted a "holy shit" in reply to Taibbi's post about the Biden team alerting Twitter to the five tweets. (Taibbi didn't say, and perhaps wasn't told, they were all porn.)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598850682487943168

Everyone's been pointing out that the Constitution doesn't work this way: it bans Congress, and by implication government, from abridging free speech.
But there's a more interesting angle: how should privately run social media platforms apply the spirit of the Constitution?

That's what D congressman Ro Khanna meant by "free speech principles" in his message to Twitter back in Oct. 2020, during the scandal over Twitter's initial decision to ban sharing of the NY Post's Hunter laptop emails story.

It's a big topic, and we're just beginning to learn Musk's position. We can be sure he doesn't want any government interference in Twitter moderation. But will his moderation be neutral, or biased, and who will be in charge of it?

Musk tells us a lot by calling the Biden campaign alerting Twitter to Hunter porn a violation of the Constitution. He tells us he's going to lie and fake and fan fake outrage to mislead people into believing he's correcting a left bias. He tells us he wants a right-wing bias.