The 'Twitter Files' Is What It Claims to Expose

[CousinIT]

(in other words, pretentious hypocrisy CONTINUES to be the hallmark of Republicans)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/twitter-files-explained-elon-musk-taibbi-weiss-hunter-biden-laptop.html

. . .

Specifically, Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who have long endorsed aspects of the GOP’s indictment of the platform. Taibbi and Weiss proceeded to publish a pair of exposés on Twitter’s inner workings. Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity. Musk’s commentary on the Twitter Files, meanwhile, proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.

For these reasons, the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.

Everything you probably don’t need to know about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The first installment of the Twitter Files concerned the social media platform’s suppression of an October 2020 New York Post article about emails ostensibly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop. To appreciate how unhinged the conservative narrative about the “Twitter Files” is, and how irresponsible Musk’s presentation of them has been, one must first understand the flimsiness of the article that kicked off the whole controversy.

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from Hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton, they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting — nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop, or his relationship with Burisma — has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.