The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose (NY Magazine)

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules.