‘Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” Brandon Borrman, vice president of Twitter’s global communications, asked other executives when the company used tools normally reserved for blocking child pornography to stop users from sharing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Nobody answered, “Yes.” They couldn’t.
“We’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified,” said Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-head of so-called Trust and Safety.
“Erring” is the proper word.
Twitter made this fateful decision in a panic, bowing to leftist groupthink within its ranks, with almost no input from its CEO and in flat contradiction to its stated rules. We found this all out this weekend as Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk made available the internal emails about the social network’s decisions on this matter to longtime radical journalist Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi’s reporting contained other fascinating details about Twitter’s content moderation, confirming that political campaigns, the DNC, and the Trump White House had access to Twitter executives and pushed Twitter to delete certain material. These requests were often honored, even when it violated Twitter’s rules. However, Taibbi alleged that this system tended to favor Democrats who could get a more sympathetic hearing from Twitter employees.
An interesting side story is that Democratic congressman Ro Khanna intervened with a top Twitter executive, arguing that the Hunter Biden decision violated free-speech principles and could lead to “serious efforts to curtain section 230” of the Communications Decency Act. He’s to be commended for his spirit of fair play, which is in short supply these days.
It’s worth noting that Taibbi’s reporting did not confirm the worst. While Twitter had been given a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about foreign hacking, Taibbi relayed, “there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.” (This didn’t stop Donald Trump from calling for the overturning of the American constitutional order in response to the story.)
Taibbi’s reporting did show that Democrats in Congress complained that Twitter wasn’t doing enough to censor the Right and believed that, with enough content moderation, “conservatives wouldn’t even think to use social media for disinformation, misinformation, or otherwise.” That is, Democrats wanted Silicon Valley to demoralize conservatives so they wouldn’t bother to share content on social media whatsoever.
Whether or not Elon Musk can make Twitter a business success, he’s shown an admirable impulse to push back against and expose those forces who made Twitter a tool of the progressive blob.