Twitter owner Elon Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday evening unveiled internal Twitter communications about what drove the tech firm to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story on the platform in the last weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Dubbed “The Twitter Files” by Musk, Taibbi published a series of tweets on his Twitter account that contains what appears to be a mix of internal emails and communications amongst Twitter employees as they grappled with how to excuse their decision to censor the report.
Taibbi explained that Twitter’s early tools for “controlling speech” were designed to combat spam and financial fraudsters but that over time staff began “to find more and more uses for these tools.” Soon, and at a growing rate, “outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech, he wrote….