There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the “Biden administration” told Twitter to “censor” the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much:
Of course, in 2020 Donald Trump was in the White House. So either he’s a very confused old man or he’s accusing himself of rigging the election against himself.
Of course, none of this is actually true. As we’ve covered extensively, there remains zero evidence that the Trump White House or even the Biden campaign put pressure on social media to block that story. What did happen was (1) the FBI sent generic warnings to social media to be on the lookout for foreign adversaries conducting hack-and-leak operations to impact the election, but took no stance on the Hunter Biden story, and (2) the Biden administration made a few requests to social media sites solely asking the companies to remove nude selfies that Hunter had on his laptop (i.e., nothing political).
Still, if just a month ago Trump was claiming that any effort to ask Twitter to limit access is proof of an election being “rigged,” you’d have to imagine that he’s furious that [checks notes] his own campaign reached out directly to Elon Musk to get him to remove any link to the hacked-and-leaked internal Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance.
You will recall, of course, that hackers from Iran supposedly social engineered their way into the Trump campaign system and have been trying to get the media to share the docs. They finally found a rando Substacker willing to do so, and then he was quickly banned, as were all links to the document on ExTwitter. As we noted at the time, basically everyone seemed to switch their positions on whether or not this was okay.
Supporters of Elon and Trump insisted that this banning and blocking was absolutely aboveboard and necessary. Supporters of Harris insisted that this was awful, terrible censorship and election interference. Neither seemed willing to recognize that the scenario was effectively identical to four years ago.
Except, it was even more extreme. The NY Times reported late last week that — unlike four years ago — the Trump campaign actually did call Elon to get the content removed.
The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
So, if you’re paying along at home, the Biden campaign did not do anything to get Twitter to block the original story. But to Trumpists, it proves that they “rigged the election” against Trump. Yet here, we now have the same platform, now controlled by someone who has explicitly come out in favor of Donald Trump and revamped the site to basically push pro-Trump material over and over again.
And when a similar situation developed, this time the Trump campaign did reach out to ExTwitter and got them to put in place much more restrictive blocks on the content (old Twitter only blocked one link for 24 hours before reversing course).
Once again, we’re seeing how this works: if Trump does it, it’s perfectly reasonable and no problem. If anyone else is accused of doing it (misleadingly) in favor of a Democrat, it’s treason and election interference.
What a fucked up, stupid situation.
Even worse, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has noted, when JD Vance is asked whether or not Trump won the 2020 election, he is now trying to blame the government “censorship” (that did not happen) of the NY Post story as a retort.
“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” he was asked.
“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” he replied.
This is his parry, the idea that one couldn’t say the 2020 election was fair because there was an effort to censor this determinative story. It is, as we’ve noted in the past, a way for people unwilling to echo Trump’s wilder election-fraud claims to instead point to something less easily falsifiable, this idea that anti-Trump forces put their thumbs on the scales.
But what Vance says here is falsifiable. It is not the case that tech companies censoring a story — specifically, a New York Post story about an email attributed to a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter — cost Trump the election.
This is a seven-layer cake of lies. Vance is lying about almost everything here to paint a totally false picture and to avoid admitting what he knows is true: that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020.
It’s been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example.
Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: “Outrageous censorship!” and possibly a “First Amendment violation!”
ExTwitter, under Elon: Blocks links to leaked JD Vance dossier. Also Elon: “Most egregious doxxing ever!” Hmm…
As we’ve discussed for years now, very few people fully understand what happened four months ago with Twitter and the NY Post’s story about the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Two years ago, we pieced together what actually happened based on information from lawsuits, but also from what Elon released after taking over Twitter (though he did so misleadingly).
In short, Twitter had a very, very broad policy (too broad!) regarding “hacked materials.” We had criticized how that policy had been used to hide news reports before the whole Hunter Biden laptop story came out, warning that the policy was too broad and resulted in blocking legitimate news based on leaks.
At the same time, there were widespread (legitimate) concerns that foreign entities might engage in “hack and dump” efforts to leak critical information, as had happened in 2016. The folks who had access to the details of the laptop had shopped the contents around to multiple news sources who all refused to publish it, including Fox News. Eventually, the NY Post bit on the story, though even the main author of it was so unsure of the story he asked for his name to be taken off the byline. The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory.
Given the general concerns about amplifying a “hack and dump” campaign perhaps by a foreign adversary, and with no direct communication by the government, Twitter had a quick internal discussion. Then, they decided to limit access to the NY Post’s story under the “hacked materials” policy (as they had done before) until they knew more about the provenance of the laptop content. At that point, users were unable to sharethe link to just that story.
The internal leaks from the company showed that the decision makers inside the company struggled with how to deal with this, but politics did not come into play. Instead, they noted that given it “is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear” and the risks, they decided to err on the side of caution and limit the distribution.
This did not actually limit interest in the article (hello Streisand Effect), which got way more traffic once Twitter made that decision.
Just one day later, Twitter admitted it had made a mistake, changed the policy, and again began allowing users to share that story.
Following that, there have been years of nonsense. This includes a firm (false) belief that Twitter actively tried to stifle the story for political reasons, that it blocked the story for months, that it knew the story was real, that the FBI and/or the non-existent Biden administration (remember Trump was the President at the time) had ordered Twitter to suppress the story.
An election interference lawsuit was filed… and rejected. There were Congressional investigations from Jim Jordan, which turned up nothing (but which he still spun as exposing conspiratorial actions).
But to many, including Elon Musk and many of his most vocal fans, it is taken as fact that old evil Twitter deliberately censored that story for political reasons, possibly changing the course of the 2020 election (even though literally none of that is accurate).
When his own company released the fact that the Biden campaign (not administration) asked Twitter if it might remove five tweets that showed Hunter Biden dick pics that were revealed as a part of the leak, Elon claimed that this story was a quintessential “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” even as the tweets clearly violated Twitter’s policy against the sharing of non-consensual nude images.
Indeed, many people cite that false narrative as a reason they’re happy that “free speech absolutist” Elon took over to make sure such a thing would never happen again.
Fast forward to yesterday…
Hold onto your hats, folks. This year, there are widespread (legitimate) concerns about foreign interference in the election including “hack and dump” efforts. Over the last month, there have been tons of stories regarding how Iran had hacked Trump officials, obtained a bunch of things, and shopped them around to a variety of media sources, who all refused to publish it.
Eventually, one dipshit decided to publish at least some of it: the Trump internal dossier on JD Vance. In this case, the dipshit was Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter, known for his terrible reporting as well as his willingness to beg for attention on social media.
The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory. It’s a dossier of all the reasons why Vance might be a bad VP choice. There’s little that’s surprising in there.
So, the scenario has an awful lot of similarities to the Hunter Biden laptop story, right? Almost eerily so. But this time, Elon Musk is in charge, right? And so, obviously, he left this up, right? And he let people share it, right? Free speech absolutism, right? Right? Elon?
Hahaha, of course not.
And if you try to share the link to Ken’s article? According to multiple people who have tried, it does not work. Here’s one screenshot of a few that I saw showing what happens if you try:
You also can’t share the link via DMs.
Another user on Twitter notes that their own account was temporarily suspended not even for tweeting out a link to the Vance dossier story, but for tweeting a link to Ken’s post about getting suspended!
ExTwitter Safety claims Ken’s is a “temporary” suspension (just like Twitter’s temporary limit on the NY Post — though in that case they didn’t suspend the account as they did here). And the reason given is that the dossier supposedly revealed Vance’s physical addresses and “the majority of his Social Security number.”
As opposed to, say, Hunter Biden’s dick pics.
That said, the link posted to ExTwitter did not, in fact, reveal the addresses or partial SSN. It linked to an article that Ken wrote about the dossier, which then did include a link to the file, but it’s still two clicks away from ExTwitter.
Ken points out that this particular info (Vance’s addresses and partial SSN) is widely available online or via data brokers. That still seems a bit iffy, and it feels like he could have easily redacted that info, but chose not to. There are plenty of cases that many people consider to be “doxxing” that are little more than getting info from a data broker.
Elon, though, is insisting that this was “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” Which is laughably untrue.
And, of course, unlike the old Twitter regime, which made no public displays of support for presidential candidates, Elon has publicly endorsed Donald Trump, become one of the largest donors to his campaign, and turned ExTwitter into a non-stop pro-Trump promotional media site. So, unlike the old Twitter regime, Elon has made it clear that he absolutely wants to use the site to elect his preferred candidate and would have political reasons for trying to suppress this marginally embarrassing dossier.
So… is Jim Jordan going to launch an investigation and hold hearings, like he did about Twitter and the NY Post over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Is he going to haul Elon before Congress and demand he explain what happened? Will Elon release the “X-Files” revealing the internal discussions he and his employees had over banning Ken and blocking the sharing of the link?
Or nah?
Already we’re seeing Musk’s biggest fans trying to come up with justifications for how these stories are totally different. But they’re literally not. On basically all important details they’re effectively identical.
Again, I said at the time (and even before the Biden laptop story came out) that I thought Twitter’s policy was bad and they were wrong to temporarily block the sharing of the link. I also think that Elon is wrong to suspend Ken and block the sharing of the links as well.
But watch the rank hypocrisy fly. The old Twitter regime at least struggled with this decision internally (later revealed by Elon) and recognized that they were making a quick call based on imperfect information that they quickly reversed course on and apologized.
Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself.
And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.
You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.
The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.
First, it’s necessary to understand the history. It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices. They said so publicly. Hell, there was just a big, giant, massive Supreme Court case about that, where the details of government requests to social media were on full display.
But, as the Supreme Court Justices themselves made clear during the oral arguments, the White House reaching out to media providers and trying to persuade them on editorial decisions is nothing new, nor is it problematic. The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.
Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan were talking about this during the oral arguments:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You’re speaking on behalf of the United States. Again, my experience is the United States, in all its manifestations, has regular communications with the media to talk about things they don’t like or don’t want to see or are complaining about factual inaccuracies.
[….]
JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, can I just understand because it seems like an extremely expansive argument, I must say, encouraging people basically to suppress their own speech. So, like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech.
You just wrote about editorial. Here are the five reasons you shouldn’t write another one. You just wrote a story that’s filled with factual errors. Here are the 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do that again.
I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.
And just the fact that the Supreme Court did not see any evidence of this being coercive should say something.
Nothing in what Zuckerberg said changes any of that. He simply repeats what was already known and already public: that, yes, White House officials sought to persuade Meta in how it handled some moderation elements. Much of that pressure was public, and even the pressure that was private has been revealed before.
Remember, Jim Jordan has spent the last couple of years weaponizing the House Judiciary Committee to misleadingly claim that the government was “weaponized” to suppress conservative speech. He’s sent dozens upon dozens of subpoenas, almost all of which misleadingly demand responses or data based on his false belief that basic, fundamental trust & safety work is somehow an attack on free speech rights.
But make no mistake about Jordan’s end goal here: it is to prevent websites from ever doing anything to try to counter the spread of disinformation. We’re not even talking about removing or blocking content. He doesn’t want there to be any effort to fact check or debunk nonsense. And that’s because the party that he is a part of is the largest producer and purveyor of complete and utter bullshit. And having people point that out is seen as an attack.
So Jordan has framed any attempt to refute nonsense as “an attack on free speech.” Tragically, much of the media (and plenty of tech execs) have fallen into this trap and accepted Jordan’s framing.
Finally, that brings us to Zuckerberg’s letter from this week. In it, he admits (again) what has been widely known and widely reported on, and was central to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case: that some people in the White House sought to persuade Meta to take Covid misinfo more seriously.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
So what is actually revealed here? Literally nothing new at all. It was already widely reported that the White House tried to persuade Meta to be more responsive. And there were reasons for this. People were dying from Covid, and internal documents show that Zuckerberg himself was hoping that Facebook would be helpful in getting people vaccinated. But the platform was being bombarded with conspiracy theories, lies, and nonsense that was misleading people into putting lives at risk.
So, yes, of course the White House would reach out to Meta and suggest that the platform should do better in stopping the flood of misleading, dangerous info. None of that should be revelatory or even noteworthy.
And if you read what Zuckerberg says here, he still says that they didn’t do anything because of pressure from the White House: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decision, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement…”
But then he says, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
And what does that even mean? First of all, Meta was pretty fucking outspoken. When Joe Biden accused Meta of “killing people,” Meta went all out in calling that claim crazy. They said that the Biden administration was “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals” and “we will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts.”
So, what’s new here? It was widely known that the White House wanted Meta to be more responsible about Covid and vaccine misinfo. They said so publicly and privately. The private emails were widely reported on and subject to a landmark Supreme Court case that was just decided less than two months ago. None of that is new.
Zuckerberg also says that they made their own decisions and it wasn’t due to White House pressure, which confirms what was said during the Supreme Court case.
The only “new” thing here is Zuck suggesting he regrets not being more aggressive in… what…? In making sure more people saw misinformation that might lead them to make bad decisions and get sick and possibly die? And again, it’s not even that Meta didn’t push back. They pushed back hard.
And yet, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary are claiming that this was some big revelation:
So, again, neither of the first two points are new or even meaningful. It was public knowledge that the White House spoke to Meta. And, of course Meta moderated (not censored) the speech of Americans, because those Americans violated Meta’s policies. And, as a private entity, they’re free to do that. That’s American freedom, something Jim Jordan seems unable to comprehend.
Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, that’s the next paragraph of Zuckerberg’s letter:
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
Again, literally nothing in this is new. All of this was known at the time. Indeed, Meta admitted it at the time and admitted that it had probably been too quick to limit the spread of the story (just as Twitter had done, admitting the very next day that the policy was a bad one and needed to change). We’ve covered all this in great detail before.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan two years ago. This also led people to falsely claim that he admitted that they blocked the spreading of that NY Post story due to pressure from the White House, even though he said no such thing.
Both times, he said that the FBI gave general warnings about “hack and leak” operations that the Russians were working on, which is no surprise given that the Russians did exactly that during the 2016 election in releasing the DNC emails. The FBI (unsurprisingly!) also said that there were a number of potential targets, including Hunter Biden. And that was also obvious. Anyone in the President’s family and political circle would be obvious targets. At no point has anyone suggested that the FBI said that they should suppress this particular story.
And, remember, the original Hunter Biden story was weakly sourced. Multiple news organizations, including Fox News, had turned down the story. That was because there were all sorts of questions about its legitimacy. And given what had happened in the past, it seemed wise to be cautious.
Indeed, these days Republicans seem oddly quiet about news organizations still holding back on reporting on the documents that were hacked from top Republicans like Roger Stone by the Iranians in this election cycle. Is Jim Jordan going to accuse companies of illegally interfering in the election because they won’t publish those documents that are embarrassing to Trump? Why the silence Jim? Oh right.
Even more to the point, at the time of that NY Post story, the Trump administration was in charge. It was October of 2020, a month before the 2020 election. So, this “truth” from Donald Trump is absolutely insane, because he appears to be accusing himself of “rigging” the election against himself:
If you can’t see that, it’s Donald Trump posting on Truth Social:
“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.
Again, that is Trump saying “the White House” in 2020 “rigged” the Presidential election. So far, the only reporter I’ve seen call this out is Philip Bump at the Washington Post. This is Trump being so confused, he’s accusing himself of rigging the election.
Finally, Zuckerberg’s letter concludes with even more nonsense.
Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Why is he even bringing up his personal donations if this is about Meta? And, furthermore, is he really saying that he won’t do any more donations simply because “some people believe” that donations for safe voting benefit one party or another?
This is the most spineless response to a mendacious, targeted campaign by a politician who is weaponizing the power of the government to pressure a media company over its editorial policies. And Zuck folds like a cheap card table. And it’s doubly ironic, because part of that folding is claiming he won’t fold again (something he didn’t even do in the first place, but is doing now).
Oh, and of course, Elon jumps in to say this “sounds like a First Amendment violation.”
Dude, the Supreme Court literally just covered this in a case that talked quite a bit about your own site and said (pretty fucking clearly) that the record did not support any claim of a First Amendment violation.
All of this is stupid. That letter is written in the worst possible way. While it does not state anything fundamentally false, it makes it sound like things that have been public knowledge for years are somehow a new admission. It further directly enables idiots like Trump, Jordan, and Musk to claim false things about what happened. And, finally, it just contributes to a totally unnecessary news cycle.
The only actual “news” out of all this is (1) Zuckerberg has no spine and simply cannot stand up to bad faith government pressure to change his moderation practices when it comes from Republicans (he was fine doing so when it came from Democrats) and (2) Donald Trump has accused himself of rigging his own election against himself.
Zuckerberg has to know how this would play out. After all, the same misleading reaction happened two years ago when he went on Rogan’s podcast. The only reasonable interpretation of this is that he sent this letter, knowing how it would be interpreted, to give Jordan/Trump red meat to continue believing their own false and misleading claims in case Trump wins in the fall. It’s stupid and cynical, but that’s the kind of politics Meta seems to play these days.
We’ve got a double-header of cross-post episodes for you this week! Recently, Mike joined two different podcasts to discuss Congress’s response to the Twitter Files and the dumpster fire of a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee: The New Abnormal podcast from the Daily Beast, and The Sunday Show podcast from Tech Policy Press. You can listen to both conversations back-to-back right here in today’s extra-long episode.
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop, there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.
Now, to be clear, I’ve explained many times before, in other posts, why people who freaked out about how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story are getting confused, but it’s usually been a bit buried. I had already started a version of this post last week, since people keep bringing up Twitter and the laptop, but then on Friday, Elon (sorta) helped me out by giving a bunch of documents to reporter Matt Taibbi.
So, let’s review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It’s no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election — not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.
Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a “hacked materials” policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were — clearly! — some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).
The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani’s hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata).
The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.
Based on that, both Twitter and Facebook reacted somewhat quickly. Twitter implemented its hacked materials policy in exactly the manner that we had warned might happen a month earlier: blocking the sharing of the NY Post link. Facebook implemented other protocols, “reducing its distribution” until it had gone through a fact check. Facebook didn’t ban the sharing of the link (like Twitter did), but rather limited the ability for it to “trend” and get recommended by the algorithm until fact checkers had reviewed it.
To be clear, the decision by Twitter to do this was, in our estimation, pretty stupid. It was exactly what we had warned about just a month earlier regarding this exact policy. But this is the nature of trust & safety. People need to make very rapid decisions with very incomplete information. That’s why I’ve argued ever since then that while the policy was stupid, it was no giant scandal that it happened, and given everything, it was not a stretch to understand how it played out.
Also, importantly, the very next day Twitter realized it fucked up, admitted so publicly, and changed the hacked materials policy saying that it would no longer block links to news sources based on this policy (though it might add a label to such stories). The next month, Jack Dorsey, in testifying before Congress, was pretty transparent about how all of this went down.
All of this seemed pretty typical for any kind of trust & safety operation. As I’ve explained for years, mistakes in content moderation (especially at scale) are inevitable. And, often, the biggest reason for those mistakes is the lack of context. That was certainly true here.
Yet, for some reason, the story has persisted for years now that Twitter did something nefarious, engaging in election interference that was possibly at the behest of “the deep state” or the Biden campaign. For years, as I’ve reported on this, I’ve noted that there was literally zero evidence to back any of that up. So, my ears certainly perked up last Friday when Elon Musk said that he was about to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression.”
Certainly, if there was evidence of something nefarious behind closed doors, that would be important and worth covering. If it was true that through discussions I’ve had with dozens of Twitter employees over the past few years every single one of them lied about what happened, well, that would also be useful for me to know.
And then Taibbi revealed… basically nothing of interest. He revealed a few internal communications that… simply confirmed everything that was already public in statements made by Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s Congressional testimony, and in declarations made as part of a Federal Elections Commission investigation into Twitter’s actions. There were general concerns about foreign state influence campaigns, including “hack and leak” in the lead up to the election, and there were questions about the provenance of this particular data, so Twitter made a quick (cautious) judgment call and implemented a (bad) policy. Then it admitted it fucked up and changed things a day later. That’s… basically it.
And, yet, the story has persisted over and over and over again. Incredibly, even after the details of Taibbi’s Twitter thread revealed nothing new, many people started pretending that it had revealed something major, with even Elon Musk insisting that this was proof of some massive 1st Amendment violation:
Now, apparently more files are going to be published, so something may change, but so far it’s been a whole lot of utter nonsense. But when I say that both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I keep seeing a few very, very wrong arguments being made. So, let’s get to the debunking:
1. If you said Twitter’s decision to block links to the NY Post was election interference…
You’re wrong. Very much so. First off, there was, in fact, a complaint to the FEC about this very point, and the FEC investigated and found no election interference at all. It didn’t even find evidence of it being an “in-kind” contribution. It found no evidence that Twitter engaged in politically motivated decision making, but rather handled this in a non-partisan manner consistent with its business objectives:
Twitter acknowledges that, following the October 2020 publication of the New York Post
articles at issue, Twitter blocked users from sharing links to the articles. But Twitter states that
this was because its Site Integrity Team assessed that the New York Post articles likely contained
hacked and personal information, the sharing of which violated both Twitter’s Distribution of
Hacked Materials and Private Information Policies. Twitter points out that although sharing
links to the articles was blocked, users were still permitted to otherwise discuss the content of the
New York Post articles because doing so did not directly involve spreading any hacked or
personal information. Based on the information available to Twitter at the time, these actions
appear to reflect Twitter’s stated commercial purpose of removing misinformation and other
abusive content from its platform, not a purpose of influencing an election
All of this is actually confirmed by the Twitter Files from Taibbi/Musk, even as both seem to pretend otherwise. Taibbi revealed some internal emails in which various employees (going increasingly up the chain) discussed how to handle the story. Not once does anyone in what Taibbi revealed suggest anything even remotely politically motivated. There was legitimate concern internally about whether or not it was correct to block the NY Post story, which makes sense, because they were (correctly) concerned about making a decision that went too far. I mean, honestly, the discussion is not only without political motive, but shows that the trust & safety apparatus at Twitter was concerned with getting this correct, including employees questioning whether or not these were legitimately “hacked materials” and questioning whether other news stories on the hard drive should get the same treatment.
There are more discussions of this nature, with people questioning whether or not the material was really “hacked” and initially deciding on taking the more cautious approach until they knew more. Twitter’s Yoel Roth notes that “this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.”
Again, exactly as has been noted, given the lack of clarity Twitter reasonably decided to pump the brakes until more was known. There was some useful back-and-forth among employees — the kind that happens in any company regarding major trust & safety decisions, in which Twitter’s then VP of comms questioned whether or not this was the right decision. This shows a productive discussion — not anything along the lines of pushing for any sort of politically motivated outcome.
And then deputy General Counsel Jim Baker (more on him later, trust me…) chimes in to again highlight exactly what everyone has been saying: that this is a rapidly evolving situation, and it makes sense to be cautious until more is known. Baker’s message is important:
I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted. There are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.
Again, all of this is… exactly what everyone has said ever since the day after it happened. This was an emerging story. The provenance was unclear. There were some sketchy things about it, and so Twitter enacted the policy because they just weren’t sure and didn’t have enough info yet. It turned out to be a bad call, but in content moderation, you’re going to make some bad calls.
What is missing entirely is any evidence that politics entered this discussion at all. Not even once.
2. But Twitter’s decision to “suppress” the story was a big deal and may have swung the election to Biden!
I’m sorry, but there remains no evidence to support that silly claim either. First off, Twitter’s decision actually seemed to get the story a hell of a lot more attention. Again, as noted above, Twitter did nothing to stop discussion of the story. It only blocked links to one story in the NY Post, and only for that one day. And the very fact that Twitter did this (and Facebook took other action) caused a bit of a Streisand Effect (hey!) which got the underlying story a lot more attention because of the decisions by those two companies.
The reality, though, is that the story just wasn’t that big of a deal for voters. Hunter Biden wasn’t the candidate. His father was. Everyone already pretty much knew that Hunter is a bit of a fuckup and clearly personally profiting off of the situation, but there was no actual big story in the revelations (I mean, yeah, there are still some people who insist there are, but they’re the same people who misunderstood the things we’re debunking here today). And, if we’re going to talk about kids of Presidents profiting off of their last name, well, there’s a pretty long list to go down….
But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the evidence. As reporter Philip Bump recently noted, there’s actual evidence in Google search trends that Twitter and Facebook’s decision really did generate a lot more interest in the story. It was well after both companies took action that searches on Google for Hunter Biden shot upward:
Also, soon after, Twitter reversed its policy, and there was widespread discussion of the laptop in the next three weeks leading up to the election. The brief blip in time in which Twitter and Facebook limited the story seemed to have only fueled much more interest in it, rather than “suppressing” it.
Indeed, another document in the “Twitter Files” highlights how a Democratic member of the House, Ro Khanna, actually reached out to Twitter to point this out and to question Twitter’s decision (if this was really a big Democratic conspiracy, you’d think he’d be supportive of the move, rather than critical of it, but the reverse was true.) Rep. Khanna’s email to Twitter noted:
I say this as a total Biden partisan and convinced he didn’t do anything wrong. But the story has now become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been.
So again, the evidence actually suggests that the story wasn’t suppressed at all. It got more attention. It didn’t swing the election, because most people didn’t find the story particularly revealing.
3. The government pressured Twitter/Facebook to block this story, and that’s a huge 1st Amendment violation / treason / crime of the century / etc.
Yeah, so, that’s just not true. I’ve spent years calling out government pressure on speech, from Democrats (and more Democrats) to Republicans (and more Republicans). So I’m pretty focused on watching when the government goes over the line — and quick to call it out. And there remains no evidence at all of that happening here. At all. Taibbi admits this flat out:
Incredibly, I keep seeing people on Twitter claim that Taibbi said the exact opposite. And you have people like Glenn Greenwald who insist that Taibbi only meant “foreign” governments here, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If he had found evidence that there was US government pressure here… why didn’t he post it? The answer: because it almost certainly does not exist.
Some people point to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance over the summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast as “proof” that the FBI directed both companies to suppress the story, but that’s not at all what Zuckerberg said if you listened to his actual comments. Zuckerberg admits that they make mistakes, and that it feels terrible when they do. He goes into a pretty detailed explanation of some of how trust & safety works in determining whether or not a user is authentic. Then Rogan asks about the laptop story, and Zuckerberg says:
So, basically, the background here, is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and were like “just so you know, you should be on high alert, we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice, basically, that there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
This does not say that the FBI came to Facebook and said “suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.” It was just a general warning that the FBI had intelligence that there might be some foreign influence operations, and to “be vigilant.”
This is nearly identical to what Twitter’s then head of “site integrity,” Yoel Roth, noted in his declaration in the FEC case discussed above:
“[F]ederal
law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur
in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election . . . . I also learned in these meetings that there were
rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Basically the FBI is saying, in general, they have some intelligence that this kind of attack may happen, so be careful. It did not say to censor the info. It didn’t involve any threats. It wasn’t specifically about the laptop story.
And, in fact, as of earlier this week, we now have the FBI’s version of these events as well! That’s because of the somewhat silly lawsuit that Missouri and Louisiana filed against the Biden administration over Twitter’s decision to block the NY Post story. Just this week, Missouri released the deposition of FBI agent, Elvis Chan, who is often found at the center of conspiracy theories regarding “government censorship.”
And Chan tells basically the same story with a few slight differences, mostly in terms of framing. Specifically, Chan says that he never told the companies to “expect” a hack and leak attack, but rather to be aware of the possibility, slightly contradicting Roth’s declaration:
Yeah, I don’t know what Mr. Roth meant or meant, but what I’m letting you know is that from my recollection — I don’t believe we would have worded it so strongly to say that we expected there to be hacks. I would have worded it to say that there was the potential for hacks, and I believe that is how anyone from our side would have framed the comment.
And the reason I believe that is because I and the FBI, for that matter the U.S. intelligence community, was not aware of any successful hacks against political organizations or political campaigns.
You don’t think that intelligence officials described it in the way that Mr. Roth does here in this sentence in the affidavit?
Yeah, I would not have — I do not believe that the intelligence community would have expected it. I said that they would have been concerned about the potential for it.
In the deposition, Chan repeats (many, many times) that he wouldn’t have used the language saying such an effort would be “expected” but that it was something to look out for.
He also doesn’t recall Hunter Biden’s name even coming up, though he does say they warned them to be on the lookout for discussions on “hot button” issues, and notes that the companies themselves would often ask about certain scenarios:
So from my recollection, the social media companies, who include Twitter, would regularly ask us, “Hey, what kind of content do you think the nation state actors, the Russians would post,” and then they would provide examples. Like, “Would it be X” or “Would it be Y” or “Would it be Z.” And then we — I and then the other FBI officials would say, “We believe that the Russians will take advantage of any hot-button issue.” And we — I do not remember us specifically saying “Hunter Biden” in any meeting with Twitter.
Later on he says:
Yeah, in my estimation, we never discussed Hunter Biden specifically with Twitter. And so the way I read that is that there are hack-and-leak operations, and then at the time — at the time I believe he flagged one of the
potential current events that were happening ahead of the elections.
You believe that he, Yoel Roth, flagged Hunter Biden in one of these meetings?
No. I believe — I don’t believe he flagged it during one of the meetings. I just think that — so I don’t know. I cannot read his mind, but my assessment is because I don’t remember discussing Hunter Biden at any of the meetings with Twitter, that we didn’t discuss it.
So this would have been something that he would have just thought of as a hot-button issue on his own that happened in October.
He goes into great detail about meeting with tons of companies, but notes that mostly he’d talk to them about cybersecurity threats, not disinformation. He talks a bit about Russian disinformation campaigns, highlighting the well known Internet Research Agency, which specialized in pushing divisive messaging on US social media platforms. However, he basically confirms that he never discussed the laptop with anyone at any of these companies, and the deposition makes it pretty clear that if anyone at the FBI would have done so, it either would have been Chan himself or done with Chan’s knowledge.
As for the NY Post story, and the laptop itself, he notes he found out about it through the media, just like everyone else. And then he says that he didn’t talk with anyone at Twitter or Facebook about it, despite being their main contact on these kinds of issues.
Q. It’s your testimony that those news articles are the first time that you became aware that — you became aware of Hunter Biden’s laptop in any connection?
Yes. I don’t remember if it was a New York Post article or if it was another media outlet, but it was on multiple media outlets, and I can’t remember which article I read.
And before that day, October 14th, 2020, were you aware — were you aware of Hunter Biden — had anyone ever mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop to you?
No.
[….]
Do you know if anyone at Twitter reached out to anyone at the FBI to check or verify anything about the Hunter Biden story?
I am not aware of any communications between Yoel Roth and the FBI about this topic.
Are you aware of any communications between anyone at Twitter and anyone in the federal government about the decision to suppress content relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story once the story had broken?
I am not aware of Mr. Roth’s discussions with any other federal agency. As I mentioned, I am not aware of any discussions with any FBI employees about this topic as well. But I only know who I know. So I don’t — he may have had these conversations, but I was not aware of it.
You mentioned Mr. Roth. How about anyone else at Twitter, did anyone else at Twitter reach out, to your knowledge, to anyone else in the federal government?
So I can only answer for the FBI. To my knowledge, I am not aware of any Twitter employee reaching out to any FBI employee regarding this topic.
/
How about Facebook, other than that meeting you referred to where an analyst asked the FBI to comment on the Hunter Biden investigation, are you aware of any communications between anyone at Facebook and anyone at the FBI related to the Hunter Biden laptop story?
No.
How about any other social media platform?
No.
How about Apple or Microsoft?
No.
Basically, the exact same story emerges no matter how you look at it. The FBI, along with CISA, would have various meetings with internet companies mainly to warn them about cybersecurity (i.e., hacking) threats, but also generally mentioned the possibility of hack and leak attempts with a general warning to be on the lookout for such things, and that they may touch on “hot button” social and news topics. Nowhere is there any indication of pressure or attempts to tell the companies what to do, or how they should handle it. Just straight up information sharing.
When you look at all three statements — Zuckerberg’s, Roth’s, and Chan’s — basically the same not-very-interesting story emerges. The US government had some general meetings that happen with lots of big companies to warn them about various potential cybersecurity threats, and the issue of hack-and-leak campaigns as a general possibility came up with no real specifics and no warnings.
And no one communicated with the companies directly about the NY Post story.
Given all that, I honestly don’t see how there’s any reasonable concern here. There’s certainly no clear 1st Amendment concern. There appears to be zero in the way of government involvement or pressure. There’s no coercion or even implied threats. There’s literally nothing at all (no matter how Missouri’s Attorney General completely misrepresents it).
Indeed, the only thing revealed so far that might be concerning regarding the 1st Amendment is that Taibbi claimed that the Trump administration allegedly made demands of Twitter.
If the Trump administration actually had sent requests to “remove” tweets (as Taibbi claims in an earlier tweet) that would most likely be a 1st Amendment issue. However, Taibbi reveals no such requests, which is really quite remarkable. It is also possible that Taibbi is overselling these claims, because this is a part of a discussion that we’ll get to in the next section, regarding Twitter’s flagging tools, which anyone (including you or me) can use to flag content for Twitter to review to see if it violates the company’s terms of service. While there are certainly some concerns about the government’s use of such tools, unless there’s some sort of threat or coercion, and as long as Twitter is free to judge the content for itself and determine how to handle it under its own terms, there’s probably no 1st Amendment issue.
Indeed, some people have highlighted the fact that the government gets “special treatment” in having its flags reviewed. But, from people I’ve spoken to, that actually goes against the “1st Amendment violation!” argument, because many social media companies set up special systems for government agents not to enable “moar censorship!” but because they know they have to be extra vigilant in reviewing those requests so as not to take down content mistakenly based on a government request.
So, sorry, so far there appears to be no government intrusion, and certainly no 1st Amendment violation.
4. The Biden campaign / Democrats demanded Twitter censor the NY Post! And that’s a 1st Amendment violation / treason / the crime of the century / etc.
So, again, the only way that there’s a 1st Amendment violation is if the government issued the demand. And in October of 2020, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee… were not the government. The 1st Amendment does not restrict their ability, as private citizens (even while campaigning for public office) to flag content for Twitter to review against its policies. Hilariously, Elon Musk seems kinda confused about how time works. That tweet that we screenshotted about about the “1st Amendment” violation is in response to an internal email that Taibbi revealed about what Taibbi (misleadingly) says are “requests from connected actors to delete tweets” followed by a screenshot of Twitter employees listing out some tweets saying “more to review from the Biden team” and someone responding “handled these.”
There was then the next tweet which was a similar set of two tweets sent over from the Democratic National Committee (as compared to the Biden campaign in the first one). This includes a tweet from the actor James Woods, which the Twitter team calls special attention to for being “high profile.”
Except, as a few enterprising folks discovered when looking up those tweets listed, they were… basically Hunter Biden nude images that were found on the laptop hard drive, which clearly violated Twitter’s terms of service (and likely violated multiple state laws regarding the sharing of nonconsensual nude images). This includes the James Woods tweet, which included a fake Biden campaign ad that showed a naked picture of Hunter Biden lying on a bed with his (only slightly blurred) penis quite visible. I’m not going to share a link to the image.
A good investigative reporter might have looked up what was in those tweets before posting a conspiratorial post implying that these were attempts by the campaign to remove the NY Post story or some other important information. But Taibbi did not. Nor has he commented on it since.
On top of that, while Taibbi claims that these were “requests to delete,” as the Twitter email quite clearly says, these are for Twitter to “review.” In other words, these were flagged for Twitter to review if they violate Twitter’s policies as the naked images clearly do.
So, there’s clearly no 1st Amendment concern here because, despite Musk’s understanding of the space-time continuum, the Biden administration was not in the White House in October of 2020. Second, even if we’re concerned about political campaigns asking for content to be deleted, flagging content for companies to review to see if they violate policies is not (in any way) the same as demanding it be deleted. Anyone can flag content. And then the company reviews it and makes a determination.
Even more importantly, nothing revealed so far suggests that the campaign had anything to say to Twitter regarding the NY Post story or any story regarding the laptop. Literally the only concerns raised were about the naked pictures.
Finally, as noted above, the only other Democrat mentioned so far in the Twitter files is Rep. Ro Khanna who told Twitter it was wrong to stop the links to the NY Post article, and urged them to rescind the decision in the name of free speech. That does not sounds like the Democrats secretly pressuring the company to block the story. It kinda sounds like the exact opposite.
So despite what everyone keeps yelling on Twitter (including Elon Musk) this still doesn’t appear to be evidence of “censorship” or even “suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.” It’s just focused on the nonconsensual sharing of Hunter’s naked images.
As a side note, Woods has now said he’s going to sue over this, though for the life of me I have no idea what sort of claim he thinks he has, or how it’s going to go over in court when he claims his rights were violated when he was unable to share Hunter’s dick pic.
5. But Jim Baker! He worked for the FBI! And he was in charge of the Twitter files! Clearly he’s covering up stuff!
Here we are ripping from the stupidity headlines. This one came out just last night as Taibbi added a “supplement” to the Twitter files, again seemingly confused about how basically anything works. According to Taibbi in a very unclear and awkwardly worded thread, he and Bari Weiss (another opinion columnist who Musk has decided to share the files with) were having some sort of “complication” in accessing the files. Taibbi claims that Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, Jim Baker, was reviewing the files, and somehow this was as problem (he does not explain why or how, though there’s a lot of conjecture).
Baker is, in fact, the former General Counsel at the FBI. It made news when he was hired.
Baker was subject to a bunch of conspiracy theory stuff a few years ago regarding the FBI and some of the sillier theories regarding the Trump campaign, including the Steele Dossier and the even sillier “Alfa Bank” story (which had always been silly and lots of people, including us, had mocked when it came out).
But despite all that, there’s really little evidence that Baker has done anything particularly noteworthy here. The stuff about his actions while at the FBI is totally overblown partisan hackery. People talk about the so-called “criminal investigation” he faced for his work looking into Russian interference in the 2020 election, but that appears to be something mostly cooked up by extreme Trumpists in the House and appears to have gone nowhere. And, yes, he was a witness at the Michael Sussman trial, which was sorta connected to the Alfa Bank stuff, but his testimony supported John Durham, not Michael Sussman, in that he claimed that Sussman made a false statement to him, which the entire case hinged on (and, for what it’s worth, the trial ended in acquittal).
In other words, almost all of the FBI-related accusations against Baker are entirely “guilt by association” type claims, with nothing at all legitimate to back them up.
As for Twitter, we already highlighted Baker’s email that Taibbi revealed, which shows a normal, thoughtful, cautious discussion of a normal trust & safety debate, with nothing even remotely political.
The latest claims from Taibbi and Weiss also don’t make much sense. Elon Musk has told his company to hand over a bunch of internal documents to reporters. Any corporate lawyer would naturally do a fairly standard document review before doing so to make sure that they’re not handing over any private information or something else that might create legal issues for Musk. And since a large chunk of the legal team has left the company, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the task ended up on Baker’s desk.
Now, you can argue (as Taibbi and others now imply) that there’s some massive conflict of interest here, but, uh… that’s not at all clear, and not really how conflict of interest works. And, again, there’s little indication that Baker had a major role here at all, beyond being one of many who weighed in on this matter (and did so in a perfectly reasonable manner).
Honestly, Baker not reviewing the documents first would have potentially put him in legal jeopardy for not doing the very basic function of his job in making sure the company he worked for didn’t put itself in serious legal jeopardy by revealing things that might create huge liabilities for Musk and the company.
Either way, late Tuesday, Musk announced that Baker had “exited” from the company, and when asked by a random Twitter user if he had been “asked to explain himself first” Musk claimed that Baker’s “explanation was… unconvincing.”
And perhaps there’s something more here that will be revealed by Weiss now that the shackles have been removed. But, based on what’s been stated so far, a perfectly plausible explanation is that Musk confronted Baker wanting to know why he was holding back the files and what his role was in “suppressing” the NY Post story. And Baker told him, truthfully, that his role was exactly as was revealed in the email (giving his general thoughts on the proper approach to handling the story) and that he was reviewing documents because that’s his job, and Musk got mad and fired him.
Somewhat incredibly, Musk also seemed to imply he only learned of Baker’s involvement on Sunday.
Some people are claiming that Musk is saying he only discovered that Baker worked for him on Sunday, which is possible but seems unlikely. Conspiracy theorists had pointed out Baker’s role at the company to Musk as far back as April. A more charitable explanation is that Musk only discovered that Baker was handling the document review on Sunday. And I guess that’s plausible but, again, really only reflects extremely poorly on Musk.
If he’s going to reveal internal documents to reporters, especially ones that Musk himself keeps claiming implicate him in potential criminal liability (yes, it happened before his time, but Musk purchased the liabilities of the company as well), it’s not just perfectly normal, but kinda necessary to have lawyers do some document review. Again, as a more charitable explanation, perhaps Musk just wanted a different lawyer to do the review, and my only answer there is maybe he shouldn’t have gotten rid of so many lawyers from the legal team. Might have helped.
So, look, there could be a possible issue here, but given how much has been totally misrepresented throughout this whole process, without any actual evidence to support the “Jim Baker mastermind” theory, it’s difficult to take it even remotely seriously when there’s a perfectly normal, non-nefarious explanation to how all of this went down.
The absence of evidence is not evidence that there’s a coverup. It might just be evidence that you’re prone to believing in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, though.
6. Still, all this proved that Twitter is “illegally” biased towards Democrats!
Taibbi made a big deal out of the fact that Twitter employees overwhelmingly donated to Democrats in their political contributions, which is not exactly new or surprising. Musk commented on this as well, suggesting sarcastically it was proof of bias at Twitter, but left out that among the companies in the chart he was commenting on… was also Tesla, where over 90% of employee donations went to Democrats.
But, more importantly, it’s not surprising in the least. Employees of many companies lean left. Executives (who donate way more money) tend to lean right. I mean, you can look at a similar chart of executive donations that shows they overwhelmingly go to Republicans. Neither is illegal, or even a problem. It’s just reality.
And companies making editorial decisions are… in fact… allowed to have bias in their political viewpoints. I would bet that if you looked at donations by employees at the NY Post or Fox News, they would generally favor Republicans. Indeed, imagine what would happen if someone took over Fox News and suddenly started revealing (1) communications between Fox News execs and Republican politicians and campaigns and (2) internal editorial meeting notes regarding what to promote. Don’t you think it would be way more biased than what the Twitter files revealed?
Here’s the important point on that: Fox News’ clear bias is not illegal either. And, indeed, if Democrats in Congress held hearings on “Fox News’ bias” and demanded that its top executives appear and explain their editorial decision making in promoting GOP talking points, people should be outraged over the clear intimidation factor, which would obviously be problematic from a 1st Amendment angle. Yet I don’t expect people to get all that worked up about the same thing happening to Twitter, even though it’s actually the same issue.
Companies are allowed to be biased. But the amazing thing revealed in the Twitter files is just how little evidence there is that any bias was a part of the debate on how to handle this stuff. Everything appeared to be about perfectly reasonable business decisions.
And… that’s it. I fear that this story is going to live on for years and years and years. And the narrative full of nonsense is already taking shape. However, I like to work off of actual facts and evidence, rather than fever dreams and misinterpretations. And I hope that you’ll read this and start doing the same.
Last Friday evening, Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi dropped a non-bombshell on everyone, with the revelation of internal Twitter documents about the content moderation around Hunter Biden’s laptop that showed… nothing particularly unusual or notable happened, and there’s no evidence of government interference. Over the weekend, Mike was interviewed by Justin Hendrix for the Tech Policy Press podcast for a closer look at just what was contained in “the Twitter Files”, and we’ve got the whole conversation for you here on this week’s episode.
At the end of last year we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a computer repair shop whose name became somewhat famous after the NY Post ran a story regarding what was apparently Hunter Biden’s laptop that had been abandoned at the shop, which eventually found its way to Rudy Giuliani. When the initial story broke, both Twitter and Facebook moved to limit the spread of the article as there were some initial concerns about the veracity of the story. In Twitter’s case, it said that the story violated its policy on “hacked materials” (a policy that we’ve argued was problematic for journalism).
Isaac then argued that because of Twitter’s moderation decision over “hacked materials” that it had defamed him in calling him a hacker. Consider this the precursor to a flurry of other lawsuits we’ve seen recently of mostly bad faith actors arguing that the reasons they were moderated are defamatory, which is not how any of this works. The initial lawsuit was tossed the same day it was filed on jurisdictional grounds, but a substantially similar lawsuit was filed a couple months later that solved the jurisdiction question by adding Madbits as a defendant. Madbits was an image search startup that Twitter acquired many years ago and shut down. Isaac argues in the complaint that Madbits still exists (even though Florida records show the company was shut down after the acquisition) as a way for Twitter to somehow skirt Florida employment laws. Either way, the addition of Madbits provided the kind of diversity jurisdiction necessary to keep the case alive, unlike the initial version that got tossed.
Of course, it still didn’t help — and Florida’s anti-SLAPP law now means that Isaac is on the hook for Twitter’s legal fees. The ruling is pretty straightforward. This was not anything even remotely close to defamation. Regarding the “defamation per se” claims, the judge notes that Isaac’s legal “theory is flawed for several reasons.” Mainly because nothing Twitter did was in reference to Isaac himself.
Here, in contrast, the only persons identified in the Explanations are the NY Post, Hunter
Biden, ?Ukranian biz man? and ?dad??not Plaintiff, his business, or any other descriptive
information that made Plaintiff?s identity readily ascertainable…. The Court is
certainly sympathetic to the events that took place and could envision a plausible claim had the
explanations identified the ?Mac Shop,? ?a Delaware repair shop? or even included a photo of the
Repair Authorization. However, such is not the case here, and the law will not subject Defendant
to liability where it was ?meticulous enough? to preserve Plaintiff?s anonymity
And then we have Florida’s anti-SLAPP law to thank for Isaac having to pay Twitter’s lawyers’ fees.
The Court agrees that Defendant is entitled to an award of attorneys? fees and costs under
Florida?s anti-SLAPP statute. First, for the reasons set forth above, Plaintiff?s defamation claim is
without merit….
Second, the instant suit arose from Defendant?s protected First Amendment activity?i.e.,
preventing the dissemination of the NY Post Article on its platform for violation of its content
moderation policies. See Corsi v. Newsmax Media, Inc., No. 20-cv-81396-RAR, 2021 WL 626855,
at *11 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 12, 2021) (first amendment protection for ?hosting and moderating a debate
on matters of public concern.?). Plaintiff maintains that the anti-SLAPP statute is inapplicable
because ?[Defendant] was not moderating a discussion of public issues[,]? but instead
?attempting to suppress a discussion of public issues[.]? …. While this precise
issue has not yet been addressed in the context of Florida?s anti-SLAPP Statute, the Court agrees
with the numerous decisions of other courts that Defendant has a ?First Amendment right to decide
what to publish and what not to publish on its platform.?
That last line is an important reminder: every website has a 1st Amendment right about what can and cannot be published on its site.
Either way, SLAPP suit dismissed, lawyers fees must be paid by Isaac.
Summary: Three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published an article that supposedly detailed meetings Hunter Biden (son of presidential candidate Joe Biden) had with a Ukrainian energy firm several months before the then-Vice President allegedly pressured Ukraine government officials to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.
The “smoking gun” — albeit one of very dubious provenance — provided ammo for Biden opponents, who saw this as evidence of Biden family corruption. The news quickly spread across Twitter. But shortly after the news broke, Twitter began removing links to the article.
Backlash ensued. Conservatives claimed this was more evidence of Twitter’s pro-Biden bias. Others went so far as to assert this was Twitter interfering in an election. The reality of the situation was far more mundane.
As Twitter clarified — largely to no avail — it was simply enforcing its rules on hacked materials. To protect victims of hacking, Twitter forbids the distribution of information derived from hacking, malicious or otherwise. This policy was first put in place in March 2019, but it took an election season event to draw national attention to it.
The policy was updated after the Hunter Biden story broke, but largely remained unchanged. The updated policy explained in greater detail why Twitter takes down links to hacked material, as well as any exceptions it had to this rule.
Despite many people seeing this policy in action for the first time, this response was nothing new. Twitter had exercised it four months earlier, deleting tweets and suspending accounts linking to information obtained from law enforcement agencies by the Anonymous hacker collective and published by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets. The only major difference was this involved acknowledged hackers and had nothing to do with a very contentious presidential race.
Decisions to be made by Twitter:
Does the across-the-board blocking of hacked material prevent access to information of public interest?
Does relying on the input of Twitter users to locate and moderate allegedly hacked materials allow users to bury information they’d rather not seen made public?
Is this a problem Twitter has handled inadequately in the past? If so, does enforcement of this policy effectively deter hackers from publishing private information that could be damaging to victims?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
Given the often-heated debates involving releases of information derived from hacking, does leaving decisions to Twitter moderators allow the platform to decide what is or isn’t newsworthy?
Is the relative “power” (for lack of a better term) of the hacking victim (government agencies vs. private individuals) factored into Twitter’s moderation decisions?
Does any vetting of the hacked content occur before moderation decisions are made to see if released material actually contains violations of policy?
Resolution: The expanded version of Twitter’s rules on hacked material remain in force. The additions to the policy in response to questions about its takedown of the Post article more clearly state what is or isn’t allowed on the platform. The expanded rules presumably also make it easier for moderators to make informed decisions, rather than simply remove any information that may appear to be the result of hacking.
As basically a million people mentioned to me, on Monday, John Paul Mac Isaac, computer repair shop owner, sued Twitter for defamation. You may recall his name as the computer repair shop guy who allegedly had Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which later became a NY Post story. That story then became a content moderation story, as both Twitter and Facebook sought to limit the spread of the story. In Twitter’s case, the company claimed that it violated the social media site’s policy against linking to “hacked materials.”
As we noted at the time, this Twitter policy had been in place for a while and was already controversial in how it had shut down accounts that were clearly doing journalism based on hacked documents. Twitter later changed its policy regarding hacked materials, in large part due to the controversy over this story.
When I was first pointed to the lawsuit, I assumed that like nearly all defamation lawsuits against Twitter, it was actually about posts by users (which would be clearly barred by Section 230). The lawsuit is ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous in a different way. Isaac was not suing over user speech on Twitter, but over Twitter’s decision to refer to that material as “hacked,” which he claimed defamed his reputation, and made people think he was a hacker.
Defendant’s Distribution of Hacked Materials Policy (“Hacked Materials Policy”) defines a “hack” as “an intrusion or access of a computer, network, or electronic device that was unauthorized or exceeded authorized access….
The Hacked Materials Policy further defines “hacked materials” as “information obtained through a hack.”
Defendant’s actions and statements had the specific intent to communicate to the world that Plaintiff is a hacker.
According to Merriam-Webster, a “hacker” is “a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system.”
The term “hacker” is widely viewed as disparaging, particularly when said about someone who owns a computer repair business.
Plaintiff is not a hacker and the information obtained from the computer does not hacked materials because Plaintiff lawfully gained access to the computer, first with the permission of its owner, BIDEN, and then, after BIDEN failed to retrieve the hard drive despite Plaintiff’s requests, in accordance with the Mac Shop’s abandoned property policy.
Plaintiff, as a direct result of Defendant’s actions and statements, is now widely considered a hacker….
So… there’s a lot to unpack here, but basically none of this makes sense. As the complaint itself notes, Twitter has a very broad definition of hacked materials, and at no point suggested that Isaac himself was a “hacker.” The policy was applied to the materials, which Twitter (for good reasons) deemed to have been private material that was not meant for public consumption. Also, if your defamation complaint is focusing on a dictionary definition, you’re probably already in trouble. And, to make matters worse, the complaint leaves out the other definitions of “hacker” in the Merriam-Webster definition, including the one directly above the definition they cited (they chose the 4th one), which also says a hacker can be “an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer” which seems like a positive thing for a computer repair shop owner.
But, even beyond that… the whole thrust of the lawsuit is garbage. About the only thing going for it is the fact that it’s not trying to hold Twitter liable for the speech of a user. Of course, even though it is actually focused (obliquely) on Twitter’s own speech, the company still might be protected by Section 230, because the speech in question was part of Twitter’s efforts to moderate — meaning that it might be a rare case where Section 230’s infamous (c)(2) clause mattered. But even without Section 230, Twitter’s speech here would be protected under the 1st Amendment.
Either way, for now at least, none of this matters, because the lawsuit was tossed out hours later for jurisdictional issues. For a case to be in federal court over state law issues (defamation is a state law), it has to have diversity (meaning all of the parties need to be in different states). However, here, both Isaac and Twitter are technically in Delaware (Twitter is registered as a Delaware company). Thus, no diversity, and no jurisdiction in federal court:
The Complaint alleges that Plaintiff is a resident of Delaware and that Defendant is a
Delaware corporation ?with an office in Dade County, Florida.?… The sole
basis for subject matter jurisdiction is diversity of citizenship…. For a court to have diversity jurisdiction pursuant
to 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a), ?all plaintiffs must be diverse from all defendants.?… Thus, accepting the Complaint?s allegations as true, the Complaint fails to allege complete diversity. Therefore, the Court is without subject matter
jurisdiction over the instant action.
It’s possible that Isaac can refile in state court. Or he could try to claim diversity by arguing that Twitter is really a California based company (given that’s where its headquarters are). The statement about it having offices in Florida is just… weird and unimportant. But even if refiled somehow, this case is a losing proposition and a clear SLAPP suit.
At the time of this writing, I’ll go ahead and assume that anyone reading this is now fully immersed in Ukraine-Call-Gate or whatever we’re calling this potentially impeachment-inducing scandal Donald Trump has managed to build for himself. What started as a murky story surrounding the administration flatly ignoring the law in handling a mysterious whistle-blower complaint has since been clarified in the extreme. What happened essentially is that the whistle-blower raised alarms over several occurrences, one of which was a call that occurred between Trump and the recently elected Ukrainian President in which Trump reportedly pushed his counterpart to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of his potential 2020 rival. Then, for reasons that are beyond me, Trump released an unredacted “rough” transcript of the call, which demonstrates that he did that very thing. You’re going to hear a great deal of obfuscation over the next days and weeks about what the transcript shows. Go read it for yourself. Trump asked Ukraine, while withholding aid money at the time, to investigate the Bidens.
In the wake of the outrage over the transcript, the White House obviously went into damage control. That’s to be expected. As part of any scandal, talking points are developed for surrogates to use when talking on any of the insanely stupid 24 hour news channels. That’s also to be expected. But once those talking points are in written format, it’s not customary to send them out to the opposing party’s Congressional members.
The White House on Wednesday sent out talking points on how to spin the release of a summary of President Trump’s phone call to his counterpart in Ukraine — but emailed them to House Democrats, apparently by mistake.
Here’s the goods, should you want to see them for yourself.
Hmmm… The White House just sent its talking points on Ukraine to House Democrats.
Now, look, I’ve made this mistake in my own professional life. That said, I’m not one of the “very best people” working for a White House embroiled in a full on scandal of its own making, so there’s that. When you’re trying to sow confusion and intrigue around what appears for all the world to be a really simple example of abuse of Presidential power, you really have to be careful about who is in that “To:” field.
And, even when I have made this mistake, I was smart enough not to frantically send out one of those useless “recall email” requests to those very same rivals I had accidentally emailed.
Source says the White House just sent a follow-up to “recall” the email to House Democrats containing talking points…
Now, I know some of you are thinking that this really isn’t a laughing matter. And you’re right, but you’re also wrong, because this is fucking hilarious. One is forced to imagine Stephen Miller himself furiously sending out recall requests to Nancy Pelosi having just realized what he’s done.
Will this inadvertent transparency matter? Probably not. If you’re the sort that spends any calories watching cable news, this will all probably fly right over your head. Meanwhile, partisanship has so infested Washington that one of the truest things Donald Trump has ever said is probably that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without consequence. So at least we can have a laugh at the very best people’s use of email, instead.
