Twitter chose to block the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 without receiving any alert from the government and struggled to find a plausible explanation for its actions, according to internal correspondence. Screenshots of the messages between high-ranking staffers were published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday. The release was endorsed by the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the US presidential election, the New York Post broke a story about files retrieved from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The exposé included emails about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, among other matters.
The water-damaged laptop had been dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, but was never retrieved.
Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account at the time and barred users from sharing links to the story, arguing that it violated its “hacked materials” policy.
According to Taibbi, Twitter “took extraordinary steps to suppress” the story without the knowledge of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, while Vijaya Gadde, former head of legal, policy and trust, played “a key role” in the process.
The journalist cited a former employee as saying that “hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” and “no one had the guts to reverse it.”