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 shared by Twitter’s new owner. Taibbi claimed to have obtained the cache of internal documents and chose to painstakingly share them one tweet at a time in narrative form.
Taibbi noted on his Substack that he had to “agree to certain conditions” in order to land the story, though he declined to elaborate about what the conditions were. (We’d suspect that sharing the documents in tweet form to boost the platform’s engagement 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 erased. 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 rule.
The majority of the records, which are internal emails from Twitter, show the tumultuous environment that prompted Twitter to block a New York Post article about Hunter Biden two years ago. The younger Biden left his laptop at a repair shop, according to a story that appeared in The New York Post in October 2020.
With a presidential election around the corner and 2016’s hacked DNC emails and other Russian election meddling fresh in mind, Twitter decided to limit the story’s reach.
