Musk releases 'Twitter Files'

Washington: Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Saturday released the 'Twitter Files' that showed that the company had responded to a request from the team of current President Joe Biden during the 2020 election.

Musk tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist and author Matt Taibbi, who began posting a series of tweets revealing the inner story about the decision behind the censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop story.

"The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story," Taibbi tweeted

Beginning the 'Twitter Files', Taibbi said the first installment in a series is based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at the micro blogging site.

"The "Twitter Files" tell an incredible story from inside one of the world's largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer," he tweeted.

"Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time," the independent journalist said.

The author added, "As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters."

Further, Taibbi said that requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine by 2020. He also cited an example of such situations.

"One executive would write to another: "More to review from the Biden team." The reply would come back: "Handled", he tweeted.

"Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party," he wrote while posting the screengrab of such requests. He then shifted to "How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story".

According to Taibbi, the social media company "took extraordinary steps to suppress" The New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be "unsafe."

"On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop," he said.

"White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: "At least pretend to care for the next 20 days," he added. The author also shared the picture of that email.

"You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, "I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe," he stated.

Earlier, in 2020, The New York Post revealed that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then Vice President, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden had put pressure on government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to USD 50,000 a month. "Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It's really [sic] an honour and pleasure," the email reads, according to The New York Post.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma's No 3 exec, asking Hunter for "advice on how you could use your influence" on the company's behalf. The 51-year-old, who has vowed to turn Twitter into a platform of free speech, had been teasing the release of the internal files for several days. "The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened. This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead," he tweeted after vowing the files would "soon to be published on Twitter itself."