Twitter's handling of Hunter Biden story spurs questions of transparency, influence

(TND) — The release of the "Twitter Files" spurred questions about the role social media plays in the spread of political news.

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk pulled back the curtain late last week on the internal debates that took place in October 2020 over the dissemination of the New York Post's story on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop computer.

Concerns have been raised that Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story, which was potentially damaging to then-candidate Joe Biden with just weeks to go before the 2020 election.

Musk, who has been framing himself as a free speech crusader, handed internal emails and the like over to journalist Matt Taibbi, who used a series of tweets to break down how the situation two years ago was handled by Twitter staffers.

Peter Schweizer, a conservative author and political consultant, voiced some of the concerns in an interview this week with The National Desk.

"First of all, that clearly the Biden campaign was concerned about this story. So, I think that kind of undercuts the other argument they're making, that this is 'old news' and people don't care," Schweizer said. "But I think the second thing it showed is that Twitter, which of course has a major impact on the news conversation in our country, has a very haphazard way of approaching these issues. In effect, the Democratic National Committee was sending letters, emails, to officials at Twitter saying that this is not true, this information is not accurate, and Twitter was taking their word for it. So, it really indicates that these social media companies are censoring information in a haphazard way. It appears to be in a partisan way."

Social media expert Andrew Selepak said this new release from Musk and Taibbi supports accusations that “there was a real lack of transparency on the part of Twitter, on the part of the employees, there’s a lack of transparency within the organization itself.”

“Musk saying that he wants the platform to be a free speech platform, he wants it to be more transparent the way it operates, he is basically demonstrating that they have a long way to go and that when he’s saying that there’s a need for it, this really in a significant way demonstrates why there is such a need for it,” said Selepak, who coordinates the social media graduate program at the University of Florida.

Phil Napoli, professor of public policy at Duke University, said transparency is admirable. But he questioned the method Musk used to release this information.

One concern was the naming of former Twitter executives, he said.

Another is that there should be “a formalized mechanism for this kind of transparency.”

“Handing stuff off to Matt Taibbi so he can start tweeting it out ... it seems very ad hoc,” Napoli said. “It seems like the latest bit of erratic behavior from a guy whose approach to managing this platform, you know, a platform that was of huge political and cultural significance, has been so erratic.”

Selepak, on the other hand, said there’s upside for Musk bringing in an independent journalist to handle the reveal.

He called it a “balanced and objective review.”

The Twitter staff debated how to handle the Hunter Biden story in 2020, removing it because they determined it violated Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy before eventually letting it circulate.

Fears were heightened heading into the 2020 election of Russian hacking and interference in American democracy.

Napoli also said the social media platforms were wary of being misled or burned by groups with agendas. Or, as he put it, “being the cat chasing the flashlight beam on the wall.”

Napoli said that all probably contributed to the Twitter employees making a decision that turned out to be an “overcorrection” with the Hunter Biden story in 2020.

“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography,” Taibbi tweeted.

Then there were questions about the pull that outsiders had in the decision to take down content.

Taibbi said officials from both political parties would reach out to Twitter to delete tweets, and he indicates that these outsiders got little pushback from Twitter employees.

Taibbi also raised concerns that this practice disproportionately favored Democrats, because the Twitter employees mostly aligned with Democrats.

Kayleigh McEnany, former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, was even locked out of her account for tweeting about the Hunter Biden laptop story at the time, Taibbi said.

These reveals will lend credibility to the suspicions surrounding Hunter Biden for some folks, said Todd Belt, professor of political management at The George Washington University.

“People are looking for a reason for this Hunter Biden laptop story to matter,” he said.

“This is going to give Republicans more fuel to mount their investigation in the House of Representatives,” Belt said. “And it’s going to make it look like there is something there. They’ll expand their investigation and try to make it look less like they’re beating up on the president’s son and more like there’s an actual malfeasance.”

Seth McKee, a politics professor at Oklahoma State University, questioned the relevance of the Hunter Biden story.

“I think of it as a rabbit hole,” he said.

McKee agreed that the release of this information from Twitter will probably give new life to Republican investigations into whether the president – when he was vice president – did anything wrong and whether his son leveraged Joe Biden’s power for personal benefit.

But McKee called the efforts a “waste of political oxygen.”

“There’s never been any evidence whatsoever to link Hunter to some malfeasance on the part of his father, Joe Biden,” McKee said.

“Most Democrats and independents, if they pay any attention, they realize that Hunter Biden’s a screwup, but how does that translate (to wrongdoing on the president’s behalf)? It just really doesn’t, as much as Republicans want it to,” McKee said.