After Twitter CEO Elon Musk teased a massive reveal Friday afternoon, journalist Matt Taibbi released a Twitter thread revealing the confusion at the social media company after it censored the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Taibbi’s Twitter thread, which Musk retweeted, revealed that Twitter’s top executives didn’t have a good explanation for censoring the story, but stuck with the decision, anyway. It also showed that Republican and Democratic congressional staff weighed in against the move.
Taibbi recounted that Twitter took “extraordinary steps” to suppress the Post’s Oct. 14, 2020, story reporting on emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicating Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business dealings. The social media company even went so far as “removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”
Twitter locked then-White House press secretary Kaleigh McEnany out of her account for tweeting about the story. Taibbi shared an email from then-President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who noted that all McEnany did was “cite the story and firsthand reporting that has been reported by other outlets and not disputed by the Biden campaign.”
