Elon Musk promised that he was going to fling open the doors of Twitter and reveal just how the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story that was broken by the New York Post, which Twitter actively banned, had gone down. There went all the Friday night plans of every journalist in the Beltway.

Musk announced the release of the story this afternoon, and then handed the tale off to Matt Taibbi, who is no right-wing journalist. Taibbi took up the tale in an ongoing tweet thread that promised to spill plenty of tea and name names. Taibbi confirms what was pretty much suspected all along – if you knew someone at Twitter in the right places, they could “review” tweets and get them removed off the platform. And while both sides of the aisle had access to Twitter in this way, the Democrats had much more of an in.

11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://t.co/sa1uVRNhuH pic.twitter.com/K1xmqQ0TrD

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

So the thumb was definitely on the scale when it came to getting rid of tweets regarding certain subjects. But then we get to the Hunter Biden laptop. Twitter seems to have gone into a panic, realizing what this information could mean. So they decided on an excuse of “hacked materials” when questioned. And at the center of all these decisions was Vijaya Gadde. She was Twitter’s top lawyer, and part of their “trust and safety” decision making. We already knew that she was heavily involved in censoring people’s accounts, including that of Donald Trump. It’s little surprise to find her fingerprints all over the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

Again, we keep seeing Vijaya Gadde, aided by now-former head of “trust and safety,” Yoel Roth, making these decisions unilaterally, because they could. No explanations needed. They had the power to shut up the New York Post and stop the story from being shared, so they did.

26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err. pic.twitter.com/2wJMFAUBoe

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

And they completely left Jack Dorsey, the CEO at the time, out of the loop. Why? Because he was the one who was being called on to testify in front of Congress. By keeping Dorsey out of the decision making, Gadde and Roth were able to give the CEO some form of plausible deniability. But do we all really believe that Dorsey had no clue what Gadde and Roth were up to? Who hired them in the first place???

Roth, notably, has tried to do some early damage control for himself by giving an interview to Kara Swisher, in which he admits that mistakes were made, our bad.

Wow, how gracious of Roth to admit that censoring the story was a mistake TWO YEARS LATER. Again, it’s clear that he and Gadde were actively working to keep this story out of people’s Twitter feeds. It’s telling that he is admitting to the “mistake” just before Elon Musk releases the receipts that have his fingerprints on them.

The beauty in the Twitter set-up is that Gadde and Roth didn’t have to be told directly to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Because Twitter was so heavily slanted to the left, it was a given that they would take care of the story by locking it down. Team Biden didn’t have to reach out and ask them. As loyal lefty lackeys, they knew what they had to do in order to get the story out of the Twitter ecosystem. The goal, as always, was to get the Bad Orange Man out of office. Who needs to tell the CEO about anything? Gadde and Roth had the control, and they used it in order to assist their chosen candidate. How much was THAT in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign worth, do you think???

While this revelation isn’t exactly a shock, it’s validating to see the receipts in black and white – and to realize that control of the media IS the control of the narrative. Gadde and Roth enjoyed their power to suppress the voices that they disagreed with. And if they just hadn’t banned The Babylon Bee’s Twitter account, thus setting in motion the entire chain of events that led to Elon Musk buying the company, then those receipts would have stayed hidden.

And I’m not sure that Musk isn’t done airing the company’s dirty censorship laundry just yet. Twitter is truly under new management, nothing like the old management.

Featured image: Twitter logo by Mizter_X94 via Pixabay, cropped and modified, Pixabay license