Twitter admits election influence operation

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Published 4 December 2022 at 09.44

Media. Elon Musk has let a journalist review internal Twitter documents that show how the company completely censored the revelation about Hunter Biden's laptop.

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It was just before the presidential election in the United States in 2020 that the New York Post published the spectacular revelations from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son Hunter.

The corruption that the material on the computer pointed to on, and involving Joe Biden himself, went down like a bomb. But the major media companies in the US chose to cover up the news and claim that it was “Russian disinformation”. At the same time, the article's distribution was stopped by the IT giants.

According to an investigation, the cover-up may have been what cost Donald Trump victory in the election.

The platform that went the furthest in censorship was Twitter, which did not even allow its users to send the link to the New York Post to each other in private messages. It is a censorship method that the company previously only used against child porn.

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk has promised to let the public know about the censorship work that went on while the company was left-wing. Journalist Matt Taibbi has now been allowed to go through internal emails and documents from the company's history.

He now shows that before the election, Twitter had direct contact with the Democratic Party, which sent links to posts to Twitter to be deleted. The Republicans also had such a channel, but according to Taibbi, the election work was strongly influenced by the fact that Twitter employees during that time very predominantly sympathized with the Democrats. In the midterm elections this year, 99.7 percent of the political donations that came from Twitter employees went to Democratic candidates.

Regarding the Hunter Biden revelation, Matt Taibbi shows how those in charge at Twitter reasoned in connection with the decision to censor the news. It turns out that they decided early on to claim that the article was based on “hacked material” and that it was therefore not allowed to be distributed.

“The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without CEO Jack Dorsey's knowledge,” writes Matt Taibbi. The key role was instead played by policy director Vijaya Gadde.

“Hacking was the excuse, but within hours almost everyone realized it wouldn't work. But no one had the courage to change the decision,” writes a former Twitter employee according to Taibbi.< /p>

According to Elon Musk, the second part of the review of Twitter's censorship will be released on Sunday,