A newly released batch of the “Twitter Files” reveals efforts by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to pressure Twitter into censoring accounts that shared media coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Published by independent reporter Matt Taibbi on Wednesday, the new emails show DNC officials requested Twitter remove accounts that shared a link to a Gateway Pundit story “contain[ing] airbrushed images from Hunter Biden videos, as well as ‘information on how to look up and view the videos in question.’” According to Taibbi, Twitter found this “violative.”
While Taibbi notes that “non-consensual nudity” (NCN) is considered a violation of Twitter rules, internal correspondence among company employees shows how not even Twitter thought many of the tweets flagged by the DNC warranted removal under the rule.
In an email on Oct. 29, 2020, for instance, an unidentified Twitter employee revealed how the DNC sent the company “a number of tweets related to a Hunter Biden story in Gateway Pundit” and had asked them to “review for NCN.” While Twitter’s GETSupport reviewed the flagged posts and “found them non-actionable under NCN,” the tweets were nonetheless referred for a “spam review,” which Taibbi says resulted in “[n]early all those accounts [being] suspended shortly after.”
A separate letter from a senior Twitter attorney documents the seemingly cozy relationship between Twitter and the DNC. Under a section titled, “Elections,” the attorney wrote that he or she “continue[s] to work with the DNC on high-profile escalations including parody accounts, whitelisting URLs,”
