Elon Musk�s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent
reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss,
and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most
important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story
encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political
scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an
unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to
throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through
censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should
also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair
elections, and indeed our country.

After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of
useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation
policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered
(and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with
Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on
internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political
events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter�s
secret policy of shadow banning, President Trump�s suspension from
Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter
by the FBI to suppress �election disinformation� ahead of the 2020
election, Twitter�s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign,
its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its
complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the
direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community�with the FBI as a
go-between�in content moderation.

As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files �show the FBI acting as
doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship,
encompassing agencies across the federal government�from the State
Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.�

The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let
us consider just three installments and their related implications: the
suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump,
and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories
reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an
out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly
hostile to the First Amendment.

Hunter Biden�s Laptop
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major expos�
based on the contents of Hunter Biden�s laptop, which had been dropped
off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked
up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family
corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his
son�s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden�s
vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens
of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine
and China. The Post�s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what
was happening.

According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice
President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy
company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in
the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon
after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian
government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. In an
earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for �advice on how
you could use your influence� to benefit the company. The Post�s
ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of
corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest
his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures.
Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing
access to Joe Biden.

Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It
removed links to the Post�s reporting, appended warnings that they
might be �unsafe,� and prevented users from sharing them via direct
message�a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and
other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the
Post�s account and the accounts of anyone who shared links to its
reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories
violated Twitter�s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no
evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.

Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in
these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde,
the company�s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of
Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done
without the knowledge of Twitter�s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was
done despite internal pushback from other departments.

�I�m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as
unsafe,� wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde
and Roth. �Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?�
asked former VP of Global Communications Brandon Borman. His question
was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker�a former top lawyer
for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former
FBI employees working at Twitter�who said that �caution is warranted�
and that some facts �indicate the materials may have been hacked.�

But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives
knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and
every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets
like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly
admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the
White House.

If there were no hacked materials in the Post�s reporting, why did
Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the
Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized
effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information
about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody
since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer
repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of
straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as
of corruption and influence-peddling.

The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI
Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Roth at Twitter through
a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with
the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence
agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter
Biden ahead of the 2020 election as �hack-and-leak� operations by state
actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark
Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast. As
Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the
Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter
about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly
told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely
pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant
process, which Twitter at first resisted.

In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret
security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible
threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan
sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth
later said that when the Post�s story about Hunter Biden�s laptop
broke, �It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-
leak campaign alarm bells.� Even though there was never any evidence
that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the
FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company�s hacked-materials
policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency
suggested it would, less than a month before the election.

Suspending the President
The erosion of Twitter�s content moderation standards would continue
after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on January
8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the
extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had
not violated any Twitter policies. As the Twitter Files show, the
suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies�
interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up
to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the
FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter�s
unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would
steadily deteriorate.

Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of
automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top
executives, most of whom used Twitter�s censorship tools to diminish
the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadow banning and
other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third
installment of the Twitter Files: �As the election approached, senior
executives�perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they
met more as time progressed�increasingly struggled with rules, and
began to speak of �vios� [violations] as pretexts to do what they�d
likely have done anyway.�