The Twitter files on Hunter Biden

On Friday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk told his followers that he would be releasing documents showing "what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter" in the lead-up to the 2020 election, calling the company’s actions "free speech suppression." On Saturday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi started a Twitter thread he called "the Twitter files," sharing screenshots of internal communications at Twitter which showed how members of the moderation team decided to throttle the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Reminder: In October of 2020, just weeks before election day, The New York Post published a salacious story with the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The computer files included email exchanges with business partners where Hunter attempted to use his father's political clout to lure people into business deals. In perhaps the most newsworthy item, Biden asks a potential partner in a Chinese venture to put a 10% cut aside for "the big guy," which appeared to be a reference to his father. The laptop also contained pictures of Hunter using drugs and having sex and text messages between him and his father.

After the story broke, 51 intelligence officials signed a letter warning that it might be a piece of Russian disinformation and that the materials may have been hacked or otherwise edited. No evidence of either allegation has ever been produced, and the contents of the laptop have now been independently verified by several news outlets and digital forensic experts as authentic. Nevertheless, Twitter opted to throttle the story, suspending some accounts that shared it and even disallowing it from being shared in private direct messages. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have pointed to the suppression of the story as one reason he lost the 2020 election.