I have spent the last hour attempting to unravel the BIG STORY — "The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story" — from Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk and, pretty much, Donald Trump, the Three Stooges of paranoid crackpottery.
As you might surmise, such self-assigned unraveling was made rather difficult since the story emerged from — paranoid crackpottery. The threesome's delusional imaginings of the darkest skulduggery committed by leftist censors of The Truth (Hunter's hacked, laptop material) can be rather murky, thus rendering clear insight a challenge. But, after assiduous deconstructing, I believe I've gotten to the BIG STORY's essence: There isn't one.
Mr. Musk kicked off the kerfuffle — taken seriously by way too many social media types — by initially posting: "The public deserves to know what really happened" with Twitter's treatment of the Hunter laptop story. He followed up: Stay tuned for an exposé.
Musk gave the job of said exposition to "journalist" Matt Taibbi, a somewhat pathetic has-been who (I can just see it) reads 20 pages of Hunter S. Thompson before ever putting a word on paper. For a story centered on hacking, there could be no one better writer than an imitative hack.
Thus Taibbi previews his 33-post "Twittter Files" as an "incredible story" of "a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer." What then surfaces is little more than internal discussions among Twitter employees discerning their moderation policy toward "hacked material" appearing on the site — that is, material hacked from Hunter's laptop.
The company's officials determined that the material in question had indeed been hacked, thus it was to be banned. It's crucial if not elementary to note here that the selfsame decision had been made about hundreds, possibly thousands of other prefabricated "stories." As Taibbi himself concedes, the site had grown so influential in social media rounds, "barriers" had to be erected to prevent perverted falsehoods from appearing. Twitter executives were merely trying to keep the site clean of ungrounded, partisan hysterics.
And here's where Taibbi believed he had struck the motherlode of Twitter's and Democrats' darkest doings: "By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: 'More to review from the Biden team.' The reply would come back: 'Handled.'" (Turns out, what Twitter "handled" in Taibbi's noted instance was the deletion of pics of Hunter's private parts, a request made by a private party. Twitter only did the responsible thing. Taibbi doesn't take a moment to explain that to readers.)
Even darker! — "Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party," wrote Taibbi. So there you have it; positive proof of Team Biden et al.'s subterranean shanghaiing of not only the Hunter B. story, but virtually any story that crooked their noses. Scandalous!
Missing from Taibbi's account is that anyone on Twitter could flag a suspicious or merely unkindly tweet for the company's review. I myself was once blocked for a week only for wondering if The Donald might someday choke on a cheeseburger. A Twitter user took issue and complained, so I was banned.
Yet there is one entry in Taibbi's "reporting" that utterly dismantles his entire thesis of Twitter's concentrated bias in favor of Dems out to "get" Trump. Something, I gather, deeply entrenched in the writer's brain, perhaps something from way back in Journalistic Ethics 101, compelled him to admit the following:
"Both parties had access to these tools. [i.e., requests for removal of objectionable material]. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
With that, Taibbi's paranoid tale of one-sided, leftist censorship blew up.
We might note, however, one authentically scandalous difference between the political "requests" observed by Taibbi. He writes of requests made in "2020." This was when Team Biden was a private organization. But he also cited requests made by "the Trump White House." And so the executive branch of the United States government was conducting hitjobs on its political opponents from inside the White House — as Nixonian as any WH can get.
Taibbi does briefly attempt to rebuild what he just dynamited. "However: This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right."
Taibbi offers no evidence, no proof of any of this. He's spitballing. Anecdotally (which, after all, seems to be the Taibbian method of journalism), I return you to my own ban from Twitter — for rather laughable cause. It took very little to have something removed from the site. Was that because of a vast right-wing conspiracy on Twitter executives' part? I think not. Nevertheless I could easily confabulate such a story based on personal experience and that of a few others. Presto: Warmed-over gonzo-journalism exposing Twitter as an in-pocket tool of the Trump White House.
From there, in his long thread, we enter Taibbi's convoluted world of Righteousness vs. Hunter Biden, based on in-credible sources such as the New York Post. About that, enough said. "The Twitter Files" is such a sensationalistic nothing, major publications — e.g., NYT, WaPo — have not bothered covering it.
The story has permitted Twitter's new owner to claim a kind of journalistic breakthrough, however — all of which he plasters with his own right-winging partisanship, the flipside of which he berates Twitter's former executives for having harbored. They were biased. Elon is merely out for The Truth. Such is the new company line, and it's as sinisterly comical as any other Muskian delusion.
Elon and Matt's labors have had one other darkly humorous effect. They lit a fire under barely rekindled Team Trump. Imagine this. Trump is livid. He's outraged! Because of Taibbi's Twitter thread, he's simply beside himself, even to the point of (once again) pitching the U.S. Constitution aside.
And so Mr. Musk's efforts at exposing nothing but his own partisanship have had their intended effect — Trumpian outrage, Q.E.D. The craggy downside for Elon and Donald is that no one, evidently, is paying much attention to The Twitter Files except those two, Matt, and me.