Musk reminded his followers that he now controls every aspect of the company, including what its employees say behind closed doors.
Earlier this week, Musk teased the release of what he called "The Twitter Files," declaring that the public "deserves to know what really happened" behind the scenes during the case of Hunter Biden.
Muskdelivered on Friday evening. A thread from author and Substack writer Matt Taibbi who is apparently now in possession of the trove of internal documents was shared by the new owner of the social network.
Taibbi said on his Substack that he had to agree to certain conditions in order to land the story, but he wouldn't say what the conditions were. Sharing the documents in the form of a twit is likely to have been on the list.
Taibbi revealed a selection of documents at a time, but it was not enough. Jack Dorsey's private email address was published in one of the screenshots. An email belonging to Rep. Ro Khanna was shared by another person. Both incidents seem to be in violation of the anti-doxing policy.
Two years ago, the New York Post had a story about Hunter Biden, but it was deleted from the website. The New York Post published a story in October 2020 that claimed to have information from a laptop that the younger Biden left at a repair shop. With a presidential election around the corner and 2016's hacked DNC emails and other Russian election meddling fresh in mind, the social media company decided to limit the story's reach.
In a conversation with members of the policy and comms teams, the former Head of Trust and Safety mentioned the company's rules about hacked materials and noted the "severe risks and lessons of 2016".
A member of the legal team wrote that it was reasonable for the company to assume that the documents were from a hack. He said they needed more information.
Taibbi said the situation to make such a consequential enforcement decision without consulting the company's CEO was unusual. Jack Dorsey was well-known for being hands-off at the company, at times working from a private island in the South Pacific and giving high profile decisions to his policy team.
The response from outside the company was swift and included one democrat.
Similar measures were taken by Facebook. The website was accused of putting a thumb on the scale for Democrats after it blocked links to the story. The company, its former CEO and some policy executives have described the incident as a mistake made out of an over-abundance of caution.
Musk hypes the release of the emails as a smoking gun, but they mostly tell us what we already knew: thatTwitter took an unusual moderation step when it probably should have given context and let the story circulate. The decision to suspend the Post's account was called "incredibly inappropriate" by Musk.
The documents from the laptop were later verified by other news outlets, but no one was able to corroborate that the documents were real and not manipulated. The Washington Post said in its own story that most of the data obtained by The Post lacks the features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity. The decision led to changes in the rules of sharing hacked materials.
In an interview earlier this week, Yoel Roth said that the story set off "alarm bells" signalling that it might be a hack and leak campaign by the Russians. "For me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content fromTwitter."
The fault was acknowledged in a roundabout way. We updated our policy and enforcement to fix straight blocking of URLs. He said that the company can now add context by labeling hacked materials.
Since buying the company, Musk has been busy with a number of moderation decisions. The reason he decided to buy Twitter was due to his anger at the suspension of The Babylon Bee.
The Hunter Biden social media controversy is a sore spot for conservatives and right wing media. The platform's past policy controversies are mostly irrelevant now with Musk at the wheel, but he apparently still has an axe to grind with theTwitter of yore.
Twitter is now allowing users to share that controversial New York Post story
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