Elon Musk announced on Friday a revelation on a scandal related to Joe Biden. What are the Twitter Files?
A convoluted story between Twitter, its owner Elon Musk and US president Joe Biden is developing before a confused audience. It’s a story about journalistic scoops, free speech and Presidential scandals, or is it? How serious is it really? Let’s start from the beginning.
On October 14th 2020, one month before Joe Biden would win the US general elections, the New York Post published an exclusive story. It showed the involvement of Joe Biden in a business scandal which took place in 2015, when he was Vice-President of the United States.
What happened was that Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, introduced his father to the board of Burisma, a company where Hunter was working at. Burisma is an Ukrainian based company operating in the fossil fuels (oil, gas) business. Burisma was also under investigation by the Ukrainian government for money-laundering, and this is where Joe Biden came in.
Hunter Biden asked his dad to force the Ukrainian government to drop the case on Burisma. Allegedly, the then Vice-President Joe Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion in loan guarantees by the US had Ukraine not abandoned the case.
Lo and behold, after a month the Ukrainian Prosecutor General was fired.
In short: Hunter Biden was working at the Ukrainian Burisma, which was also under investigation. So, Hunter asked his father Joe Biden to threaten the withholding of American funds unless the investigation was not dropped.
And this, believe it or not, is just the beginning of the story.
The role of Twitter and the Twitter files
So, the New York Post published this story in 2020. At the time, Twitter was still run by Jack Dorsey. It turned out that the New York Post story was censored from the platform: everyone trying to post it or retweet it would be suspended.
The reason for this ban was not clear at the time, but it created a lot of rumors in the Republican sphere. Why was a story framing the Democratic candidate for the elections being banned from the platform?
Then, Joe Biden won the elections and two years have passed since then. Now, Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey anymore but by Elon Musk. Musk, a billionaire with Republican sympathies, has announced on Friday the revelation of the “Twitter files”.
These “Twitter files” (not published directly by Musk but by journalist Matt Taibbi citing internal sources) are precisely about the Hunter Biden story. They reveal that barring the New York Post article was a deliberate decision by high-level executives within Twitter.
The Twitter files, however, do not show any clear reason why. There are some hints on Democratic fundings of Twitter at the time, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
Indeed, everybody knows that Twitter was funded by Democrats, and the scandal is now two years old. Despite the revelation, it does not seem it added much to the discourse.
So, is the story about Hunter Biden and his father a true scoop? We do not know yet, but it is very likely that it will come up again at some point. Stay tuned.
