Former President Donald Trump decried that a "corrupt" Department of Justice will do nothing about "The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story."
"Wow! That's a really big story about Twitter and various forms of government Fraud including, specifically, Election Fraud," Trump wrote on TruthSocial. "The same level of Fraud took place with the other Big Tech companies, if not even worse (if that's possible?).
"We are living in a VERY CORRUPT COUNTRY &, AS THEY ARE SAYING ALL OVER THE INTERNET, 'NOTHING WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT & FBI ARE TOTALLY CORRUPT.' But they'll keep investigating 'boxes' that were legally & openly taken from the W.H."
The former president's post follows after journalist Matt Taibbi broke the story on Friday night. Taibbi was granted exclusive access to documents held at Twitter by the company's new owner Elon Musk. The documents, which consist of a string of emails from Democrat Party establishment types and Twitter executives, ostensibly point to an affinity for one another.
"The decision" to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story "was made at the highest levels of the company," Taibbi writes, "but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
"'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.'"
The quote sets up Taibbi's Twitter thread showing executives at the social media company working frantically to impose their tools in quashing the Hunter Biden laptop story. However, with notable exception, Taibbi adds, California Democrat Rep. Ro "Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern."
In one exchange, Khanna writes to Twitter's top lawyer, Gadde. But what Gadde expects is a conversation about censoring the story is instead met with Khanna's concern that the censorship enrolled by Twitter presents a slippery slope for free speech.
"In the heat of a Presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if the NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good," Khanna writes.
A day after the congressman appending his concern, Twitter's head of Public Policy, Lauren Culbertson Grieco, receives a letter from NetChoice's Carl Szabo. Szabo, who sits as the vice president of one of the largest Big Tech lobbying groups, cites concerns from Democrats that there should be "more" oversight to prevent "conservatives" from "muddy[ing] the water."
"The Democrats," he writes, "meanwhile, complained that the companies are inept: They let conservatives muddy the water and make the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden is innocent.
"They linked this to Hillary Clinton's email scandal: she did nothing wrong but because the press wouldn't let the story go, it became a scandal far out of proportion. In their mind, social media is doing the same thing: it doesn't moderate enough harmful content so when it does, like it did yesterday, it becomes a story. If the companies moderated more, conservatives wouldn't even think to use social media for disinformation, misinformation, or otherwise."
"The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they're corrupting democracy and making all 'truth' relative. When pushed on how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: 'the First Amendment isn't absolute.'"
According to the Foundation for Freedom Online, since the start of 2021 and at the beginning of President Joe Biden's term, $38.8 million of taxpayer money has been issued as grants for research on censorship, doled out by the National Science Foundation.
"To ram the radical bias home," the Foundation for Freedom writes, the "NSF grant explicitly says the goal of the funding is 'to counter these populist narratives.' That is, point blank, just the U.S. government using U.S. taxpayer funds to counter the social media opinions of half of the entire U.S. electorate."
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