In election year 2020, Twitter briefly blocks revelations about Joe Biden's son. Tech billionaire Musk sees this as a political conspiracy and wants to clarify internal employee emails. But that doesn't really bring anything new to light.
Twitter boss and tech billionaire Elon Musk has launched another attack on the US Democrats. This time, he shared tweets via internal Twitter documents about the controversy surrounding a New York Post article that appeared just before the 2020 presidential election. One of the sources used is said to have been a laptop previously owned by Hunter Biden.
The article contained an email from the son of the current US President, Hunter Biden, in relation to his foreign business dealings. "What really happened to the Hunter Biden story suppressed by Twitter will (...) be published on Twitter!" Musk announced beforehand on Friday (local time) and continued to write "It's going to be great".
Twitter then blocked the newspaper's article and account because the report allegedly violated rules prohibiting the dissemination of information obtained through illegal hacks. The then Twitter boss Jack Dorsey later admitted that the platform's action against the "New York Post" was a mistake. Twitter then changed its rules.
Musk shared a series of tweets from journalist Matt Taibbi. Among other things, they showed in several screenshots of internal communication that the blocking of the "New York Post" article was also the subject of controversial debates within the company. Taibbi also wanted to prove an alleged influence of the Democrats on the platform.
But have the so-called "Twitter Files" really revealed anything new? It doesn't seem so. Because Taibbi, to whom Musk entrusted the documents, writes at one point: "There is no evidence – that I have seen – of government involvement in the laptop story." The US tech site "Wired" only sees the whole thing as fodder for further conspiracy theories. On top of that, the fact that Trump was the president at the time and the Democrats were the opposition is ignored.
Biden's son Hunter's foreign dealings had made headlines in the past and given Republicans political attacks on Democrat Joe Biden. Business in Ukraine, for example, raised questions: Between 2014 and 2019, Hunter Biden held a lucrative post on the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, while Joe Biden, as US Vice President, was responsible for Ukraine.
Musk announced further releases. He bought Twitter for around $44 billion at the end of October. Before the midterm elections in November, he campaigned for the Republicans on the platform. He later said on the platform that he would support a presidential nomination from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He also unlocked the account of former US President Donald Trump.
