The revelations in the Twitter corporate document dump reported by Matt Taibbi last week raised a firestorm on the Right and generate a mass call for a congressional investigation once Republicans takeover the House in January.
Much of the well-justified outrage centered the apparent FBI, DHS and Biden campaign influence behind Twitter decisions to ban or delete content and accounts that undermined Joe Biden’s chances of winning the 2020 election or contradicted the official government narrative on COVID origins and vaccine efficacy.
"Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly," Taibbi wrote. "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.'"
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Taibbi’s revelations is that they aren’t that surprising. Everybody knew that Twitter covered up a story that may have harmed Joe Biden. It’s just now we can see the evidence — and for that we should thank Elon Musk.
The focus on “outsiders” contacting Twitter executives to manipulate speech is understandable, but it misses a larger and we think more important point – for a long time, maybe even since its inception, Twitter hasn’t been a business, it has been a political operation.
In 2021, Twitter's annual net loss amounted to 221 million U.S. dollars. Overall, this is a significant decrease from the previous year, in which the micro blogging and social network company saw losses of almost 1.4 billion U.S. dollars. Twitter has been losing money big-time, and the picture was not improving prior to the Elon Musk acquisition. After losing a total of $2.3 billion from 2013 (the year it went public) through 2017, Twitter only booked profits in 2018 and 2019.
Many Twitter employees vocally protested Mr. Musk’s involvement in the company since his investment was announced in early April, arguing that he would shift the company culture and damage its efforts to control problems like bullying, threats and misinformation on the platform.
Prince Al Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who described himself and the conglomerate he represents as one of Twitter’s largest and most long-term shareholders, said in a tweet that Twitter should reject the offer because it was not high enough to reflect the “intrinsic value of Twitter given its growth prospects.” Others said that the offer was sufficient but that Mr. Musk’s proposed changes could spark an advertiser exodus and hurt the value of the company.
“You’re not at some garage sale bidding on a lamp,” Brent Thill, an equity analyst at Jefferies told the New York Times. “It’s a service that is beloved by many throughout the world, and you can’t just make these quick actions.”
What each of the objectors to Elon Musk’s takeover seemed to be saying was they wanted the offer rejected because they don’t want to lose the power to stifle and manage the speech of others that management of Twitter bestowed upon them.
And what the Matt Taibbi reporting revealed was those employees who objected the loudest to the Musk takeover were among those exercising the power to stifle and manage the speech of others most vigorously.
Specifically regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, Matt Taibbi reported, "there’s no evidence - that I've seen" that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story but that "the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey.” Taibbi reported Twitter’s Far Left former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde played a key role in quashing the Hunter Biden story.
"'They just freelanced it,' is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it,’" Taibbi wrote, according to reporting by Joseph A. Wulfsohn of FOX News.
The implication of the statement “they just freelanced it” is, Leftwing Twitter executives killed the Hunter Biden laptop story simply because they could – they had the power to use assets owned by their employer’s shareholders to advance their own personal political agenda and they used it – without even informing the CEO of the company.
Remember, at the time the company was not making an operating profit, so the only payout investors were getting for the foreseeable future was appreciation in the value of their shares – and the power to control one very active and important corner of the public square.
Under its previous management Twitter wasn’t a business in the way entrepreneurs of the past thought of a business. It produced no products of value that could be monetized to make an operating profit for its shareholders – its only product was the power to establish and control political narratives – and from that perspective Twitter was never a “business” it was always a multibillion-dollar Marxist political operation. The fact that Elon Musk is dismantling that political operation is one of the most significant defeats the Left has suffered in generations and one that patriots should applaud and vigorously support.
Elon Musk
Free Speech
Twitter
First Amendment
Donald Trump reinstated
Matt Taibbi
Hunter Biden laptop story
2020 election
Joe Biden campaign
Vijaya Gadde
CEO Jack Dorsey
speech suppression
Big Tech speech suppression
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