It was meant to be Friday night intrigue at Elon Musk’s social-media service, Twitter — in his words, “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.” Musk turned to the former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, to reveal — in an at times painfully slow process — what was billed, “The Twitter Files.” Taibbi said it was based on thousands of internal documents obtained by what he called “sources” at Twitter, which appear to have been shown to him with the full blessing of Musk. Taibbi said he had to agree to undisclosed terms to get access, which seem to be that his story was disseminated using Twitter rather than his personal Substack account.
Taibbi delved into Twitter’s decision, at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign, to remove links to a New York Post report about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, post warnings that it was unsafe, and block transmission via direct message. It turns out, per the files, that the decision was made by the company’s trust and security team but without the input of then-CEO Jack Dorsey. Members of Twitter’s own communications team were quoted in company emails at being puzzled by the response. Dorsey …