If A Legitimate Free Press Existed, The Twitter Files Wouldn’t

Twitter management knew immediately they had bombed big time when the tech giant censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, internal communications published on Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi reveal. Little else surprising emerged from the first installment of “The Twitter Files,” but the concrete proof provided by new owner Elon Musk of Twitter’s entanglement with the government and Democrat interests nonetheless vindicated conservatives who have been screaming for years of Big Tech’s squelching of their speech.

The Twitter Files should raise the ire of all Americans, however, and not because of what they expose about tech companies — but because they illustrate the corporate media’s complicity in the censorship of stories that prove harmful to powerful people and preferred politicians.

A little over a week ago, Musk tweeted a promise to release evidence of the company’s “free speech suppression” in what he branded The Twitter Files. “The public deserves to know what really happened,” the new Twitter owner stressed. Late Friday, Musk kept his promise when Taibbi published a detailed Twitter thread highlighting, with screen grabs, high-level internal Twitter discussions concerning the company’s censorship of posts and specifically the blocking of the New York Post’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop.

The Post published its exclusive bombshell report on emails culled from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store a mere three weeks before the U.S. presidential election. “How Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” the Post titled its Oct. 14, 2020 story that then opened by detailing that an email confirmed Hunter had introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma “less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” The email to Hunter, dated April 17, 2015, came from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma — a board on which Hunter served “at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month,” according to the Post’s article. 

Soon after the Post broke the story, Twitter and Facebook “deprecated” the story, meaning the social media giants prevented the algorithm code from allowing the story to be amplified. By mid-afternoon, however, Twitter moved to banning the sharing of the story both in tweets and in direct messages. At the time, “Twitter representatives pointed press to the company’s hacked material policy, which prohibits sharing links to or images of hacked content. Twitter’s guidelines for blocking URLs, which were updated this July, also include provisions for hacked material and content that ‘interferes with civic and election integrity.’”

Twitter’s staff went further, though, locking out the Post’s primary Twitter account (@nypost), claiming in a letter to the outlet that “the Hunter Biden stories violate its rules against the ‘distribution of hacked material.’” Twitter also locked Trump spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany out of her account merely for tweeting about the story.

Twitter reinstated McEnany’s account the following day and later

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