Here goes: How Hunter Biden story was censored on Twitter with lame justification Vijaya Gadde at helm

New Delhi, Dec 03: Twitter's new boss, Elon Musk shared a 37 long tweet-thread posted by independent journalist, Matt Taibi to show how the Hunter Biden story was censored on the microblogging platform.

The thread detailed how the former legal head of the comply, Vijaya Gadde was at the helm of censorship under the garb of vague and arbitrary rules. Gadde it may be recalled was accused of refusing to take down child porn even though the victim's parents had pleaded for its removal.

The internal communications revealed how Twitter's moderation team would receive directives from the Biden administration to censor tweets. "More to review from the Biden team," read a response by a Twitter executive dated October 24 2020.

The New York Post had published a story about Biden junior's problematic emails with a Ukrainian gas company executive from Burisma in the run up to the US elections. Biden was not in power when Hunter's story was censored.

"Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be "unsafe." They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography," Taibbi said.

He also said that the Twitter moderation team went ahead with the crackdown and even locked the account of former White House spokesperson Kaleigh McEnany. This prompted an angry letter from the Mike Hahn, the campaign staffer of Donald Trump. "All she did was cite the story and firsthand reporting that has been reported by other outlets and not disputed by the Biden campaign," Hahn said.

"Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams," Taibbi said.

"Per checking, the user was bounced by Site Integrity for violating our Hacked Materials policy. Adding them here for further insights and guidance," a Twitter executive had justified.

"They just freelanced it. 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," according to a Twitter employee on the decision making process.

"I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we're waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials," former U.S. Policy Communications Manager at Twitter, Trenton Kennedy said.

"I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we're waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials," he also said.

Former Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, had justified the move and said, 'we will face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.

"The policy basis is hacked materials - though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the severe risks here and lessons of 2016, we're erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified." Roth also said.

"A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders," Roth said.

Interestingly Gadde who was sacked after Musk took over had justified the decision to lock the account of Kaleigh McEnany. We put out a clarifying thread of Tweets earlier this evening explaining our policy around the posting of private information and linking directly to hacked materials, she had said.

Gadde further said that the press secretary's account was not permanently suspended. We requested that the delta the tweet continuing material that is in violation of our rules and her account is restricted until she complies, Gadde had said.

Taibbi further added that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was kept in the dark over the Hunter Biden laptop story cover-up. "An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get "unfucked" (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in," Taibbi said.