Elon Musk teased his 120 million followers last week about a multiday blitz of internal company documents, beginning with the reasoning behind the company’s late-2020 decision to forbid users from spreading news about Hunter Biden’s compromised laptop data.
The first incident occurred on Friday night, when writer Matt Taibbi, who had been given access to some of the business’ internal documents and emails, posted a 40-tweet thread about it.
Despite Musk’s advertising and drum-rolling, there have been no new releases five days later. Instead, there was a wild online chat on Saturday night where a cast of colourful characters discussed free speech.
The delay provides a glimpse into some of the difficulties Musk is encountering as he attempts a radical overhaul of the platform he recently acquired. This includes changing not only the company’s staffing and strategy but also its politics, moving from a platform with a strong progressive bent to one that is dedicated to a more libertarian vision of free speech.
With the implication that the lawyer was at odds with Musk’s executives, Taibbi said on Tuesday that issues involving a Twitter lawyer had delayed the release of the remaining records. Twenty minutes earlier, Musk had tweeted that the attorney had been “exited” from the business.
Earlier in a text conversation with AWN, Taibbi had blamed the delay on internal strife and Twitter’s own corporate culture. According to Taibbi, “the corporation is accustomed to functioning openly in violation of its CEO.” “Now that the most of those higher-ups are gone, this is still primarily a logistical war. Therefore, if you encounter delays or other perplexing circumstances, kindly bear that in mind.
A comment from Twitter was not forthcoming.
According to Musk, Taibbi and Bari Weiss, a former editorial writer for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, have both had access to the company’s internal documents. Both authors have been vocal opponents of what they view as liberal media groupthink, a cause to which Musk is increasingly devoting his new platform.
Weiss would be posting the following episode, according to Taibbi, whose tweet thread from Friday night is the only one in which internal documents have so far been released. Emails asking Weiss for comment received no response.
Musk is revisiting a favourite topic of conservative media sceptics by providing new information on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Twitter made the decision to restrict any connections to the New York Post’s coverage of the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. The Publish itself had its account stopped for more than two weeks for refusing to remove a tweet about the story, and users were not even allowed to post the news or even link to it in private conversations.
The incident was heavily criticised by conservative and libertarian critics as a Biden-friendly move by a social media site whose officials increasingly tilt left. Twitter later lifted the suspension and limits. Later, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time, admitted regretting his choice.
The publication is the most recent political hysteria Musk has entered since he paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter in late October. Musk then reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account based on the results of an unofficial online poll, got into a brief argument with Apple over rumours that it might remove Twitter from its app store, and banned rapper Ye, better known as Kanye West, whom Musk had seemed to embrace just a few weeks earlier, after he tweeted. This came after Twitter laid off a large portion of its staff and tried to reassure advertisers that it would take a cautious approach to restoring banned accounts.
Tuesday evening, Taibbi tweeted that he and Weiss had obtained internal corporate documents from a lawyer associated with Musk’s group.
According to Taibbi, the email he read before the Friday release was a portion of internal Twitter records that had been kept for legal purposes. According to him, Twitter’s response to a complaint made against it by the Tea Party Patriots Foundation to the Federal Election Commission included setting aside at least some of those records.
The Tea Party Patriots Foundation claimed that Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s computer files constituted to an in-kind gift to Joe Biden’s campaign in the 2020 case, which has since been dismissed.
In addition to the internal emails Taibbi published, Twitter previously provided a glimpse into how it handled the laptop story: It submitted a public response to the FEC complaint in December 2020.
Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth claimed in a sworn declaration that he had attended regular meetings with officials from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and “industry peers” to discuss threats of hacking and disinformation in the lead-up to the presidential election. In the declaration, Roth claimed that during those discussions, he was informed to anticipate a hack-and-leak operation in October and learned that Hunter Biden would be the intended target of such an effort.
It was a “mistake,” according to Roth, who left Twitter after Musk took control, to block the New York Post’s piece. When contacted for remark, he remained silent.
The publication of internal Twitter messages was criticised by Brandon Borrman, the company’s former director of communications who was named as a defendant alongside Dorsey in the FEC complaint and whose communications were included in Friday’s disclosures.
The lack of care for the harm this can cause to others who weren’t involved, he told AWN, is rather disappointing.
President of the Tea Party Patriots Foundation Jenny Beth Martin stated in an interview that she had asked her attorney to examine the publically available documents to see if there was a way to challenge the FEC complaint’s dismissal.
The video that was released on Friday showed Twitter officials debating how to respond to the New York Post’s story. There was no proof that the platform had been ordered to restrict it by government officials.
Trump criticised both Musk and the Biden White House after saying that the revelation could be used to invalidate the outcome of the 2020 election.
Taibbi claimed he has just seen a subset of the internal documents and is still reviewing them. He claimed that although the documents he had read as of Sunday night did not yet contain any important revelations, they added to his long list of arguments against online censorship. While it’s embarrassing to read, “so far everything I’ve seen largely simply validates what we know,” he said.