Bombshell Twitter files suggest censorship driven by politics and connections, not facts

Elon Musk allowed Americans a glimpse inside his explosive "Twitter files" in a process certain to take many more days. But the first release of memos gave a sobering look suggesting censorship on the platform during the 2020 election was driven by politics and political connections more than facts.

Twitter's new owner used independent journalist Matt Taibbi to release a small first batch of internal documents Friday night, detailing how efforts to censor thought on the platform began, then accelerated during the last presidential election, building to a crescendo with the momentous October 2020 decision by the platform to block dissemination of a New York Post story about alleged corruption detailed on Hunter Biden's laptop.

Though fragmentary and framed by Taibbi's personal narrative, screenshots of the first memos made a compelling case that Twitter's executives censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final days of the 2020 campaign even though they lacked substantiation for the justification that the materials were derived from hacking and therefore in violation of the platform's rules of conduct.