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Twitter chose to block the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 without receiving any alert from the government and struggled to find a plausible explanation for its actions, according to internal correspondence. Screenshots of the messages between high-ranking staffers were published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday. The release was endorsed by the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the US presidential election, the New York Post broke a story about files retrieved from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The exposé included emails about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, among other matters.
The water-damaged laptop had been dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, but was never retrieved.
Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account at the time and barred users from sharing links to the story, arguing that it violated its “hacked materials” policy.
According to Taibbi, Twitter “took extraordinary steps to suppress” the story without the knowledge of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, while Vijaya Gadde, former head of legal, policy and trust, played “a key role” in the process.
The journalist cited a former employee as saying that “hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” and “no one had the guts to reverse it.”
he internal correspondence shared by Taibbi seems to suggest that senior Twitter staff had doubts when coming up with the wording to explain the block.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking [the laptop story] as unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we’re waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials,” communications manager Trenton Kennedy wrote to his colleagues, according to a screenshot. Former Vice President for Global Communications Brandon Borrman apparently also voiced similar concerns, asking, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
Taibbi said he has not found any evidence that Twitter received any alert from the government when handling the New York Post report. Instead, the company was “proactively but cautiously interpreting this through the lens of our hacked materials policy,” the correspondence shows.
Files show staffers raised concerns about blocking a report on the content of a laptop belonging to the US president’s son.
Twitter chose to block the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 without receiving any alert from the government and struggled to find a plausible explanation for its actions, according to internal correspondence. Screenshots of the messages between high-ranking staffers were published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday. The release was endorsed by the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the US presidential election, the New York Post broke a story about files retrieved from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The exposé included emails about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, among other matters.
The water-damaged laptop had been dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, but was never retrieved.
Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account at the time and barred users from sharing links to the story, arguing that it violated its “hacked materials” policy.
According to Taibbi, Twitter “took extraordinary steps to suppress” the story without the knowledge of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, while Vijaya Gadde, former head of legal, policy and trust, played “a key role” in the process.
The journalist cited a former employee as saying that “hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” and “no one had the guts to reverse it.”
he internal correspondence shared by Taibbi seems to suggest that senior Twitter staff had doubts when coming up with the wording to explain the block.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking [the laptop story] as unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we’re waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials,” communications manager Trenton Kennedy wrote to his colleagues, according to a screenshot. Former Vice President for Global Communications Brandon Borrman apparently also voiced similar concerns, asking, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
Taibbi said he has not found any evidence that Twitter received any alert from the government when handling the New York Post report. Instead, the company was “proactively but cautiously interpreting this through the lens of our hacked materials policy,” the correspondence shows.
Stephen Ogheneochuko
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