Elon Musk reminded his followers on Friday that now that he owns Twitter, he has complete authority over every part of the business, including everything that was said by its employees behind closed doors prior to his takeover.
Musk hinted at the release of “The Twitter Files” earlier this week, saying that the public “deserves to know what truly happened” when Twitter decided to suppress a story about Hunter Biden back in 2020.
On Friday night, Musk sort of delivered. A thread from author and Substack writer Matt Taibbi was released by Twitter’s new owner. Taibbi claimed to have obtained the cache of internal documents and chose to methodically share them one tweet at a time in narrative fashion.
In order to land the story, Taibbi remarked on his Substack that he had to “agree to some terms,” though he did not specify what those requirements were. (We assume that tweeting about the documents to increase platform interaction must have been on the list.)
It appears that Taibbi did not take great care in choosing which documents to disclose at a time, tweet after tweet. Jack Dorsey’s personal email address was displayed in a screenshot that has since been deleted. Another user revealed a personal email with no redactions that belonged to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who at the time voiced disapproval of Twitter’s actions. Both events seem to violate Twitter’s anti-doxing policy.
The documents—which are primarily internal Twitter emails—depict the chaotic situation that prompted Twitter to suppress a New York Post article about Hunter Biden two years ago. The New York Post ran a report in October 2020 that purportedly used material from a laptop that the younger Biden left at a repair shop. Twitter made the decision to restrict the story’s distribution in light of the 2016 DNC hack and other Russian electoral interference.
