Musk and MAGA won’t shut up about the ‘Twitter Files’ now, but GOP officials dismissed them in 2021

[Brexiter]

Conservatives still can’t fathom how an incumbent president who has, at one point or another, grossly offended nearly everyone on the planet—other than Vladimir Putin, of course—could have possibly lost reelection. So they’ve been coming up with imaginative excuses ever since. They even stopped blaming China for COVID-19 just long enough to coalesce around a theory that China flooded the nation with bamboo ballots. But now MAGAland is all atwitter over the so-called “Twitter files,” an Elon Musk project that’s more overhyped than his Hyperloop—a future transportation paradise that they’ve now literally paved in order to put up a parking lot.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out there’s a lot less to the right’s latest manufactured scandal than meets the eye.

RELATED STORY: Musk leaks Twitter documents to pursue his own agenda, making Twitter a more dangerous platform

For one thing, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) already dismissed the accusations at the heart of the Twitter Files—which were hyped and shared by journalist-turned-MAGA-troll Matt Taibbi—more than a year ago, with three Republicans joining two Democrats and one independent in the unanimous decision. Did Twitter do something improper in (temporarily, mind you) suppressing a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election out of a (reasonable, mind you) fear that the story was a Russian psyop based on hacked materials?

Nope, according to a panel of experts who actually studied the issue.

The Daily Beast:

Agency investigators, acting on a complaint from the Republican National Committee, took up the issue as it pertains to campaign finance law—whether Twitter’s actions constituted an unlawful in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign.

And while the commissioners often disagree on these matters, there was little conflict here. Last year, they voted 6-0 to dismiss the complaint, which the RNC had filed Oct. 16, 2020—two days after the laptop story broke, and the same day Twitter reversed its decision.

The agency exonerated Twitter, with two GOP commissioners releasing a statement saying that the company had not acted with “the purpose of influencing an election.”

Meanwhile, the panel also cleared Joe Biden’s campaign, asserting it had done nothing wrong in communicating with Twitter—even though it had used its candidate’s position as a not-president with no official government role to ask the company to take down pictures of a close family member’s penis. Which is brutally unfair, since thousands of profane and defamatory photos of Trump’s dickhead sons remain on the platform, perhaps falsely suggesting that Trump Sr. has been illegally smuggling nuclear materials out of the country in his Underoos for decades.

The Bulwark:

The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

And that’s the big hubbub. Social media company removes unwanted dick pics: News at 11.

Oh, and Taibbi himself gave the game away when he tweeted this:

22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

For the nontweeters:

Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...

The federal government—which was (supposedly) being run by Donald Trump at the time—didn’t actually strong-arm Twitter; the Biden campaign simply made reasonable requests to take down posts that violated Twitter’s own terms of service; and a government panel half-comprising Republicans decided there was nothing legitimate to complain about.

How, exactly, is this a scandalous First Amendment violation?

Of course, Republicans will attempt to make a mountain out of this latest mephitic Musk-hole, but there’s really, really, really nothing there.

RELATED STORY: Musk's only hope for keeping Twitter alive is circling down the drain of that sink he carried in

Need more proof? Take a gander at this revealing TechDirt.com essay, helpfully titled “Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden’s Laptop.”

An excerpt:

[Taibbi] revealed a few internal communications that… simply confirmed everything that was already public in statements made by Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s Congressional testimony, and in declarations made as part of a Federal Elections Commission investigation into Twitter’s actions. There were general concerns about foreign state influence campaigns, including “hack and leak” in the lead up to the election, and there were questions about the provenance of this particular data, so Twitter made a quick (cautious) judgment call and implemented a (bad) policy. Then it admitted it fucked up and changed things a day later. That’s… basically it.

And, yet, the story has persisted over and over and over again. Incredibly, even after the details of Taibbi’s Twitter thread revealed nothing new, many people started pretending that it had revealed something major, with even Elon Musk insisting that this was proof of some massive 1st Amendment violation.

...

Companies are allowed to be biased. But the amazing thing revealed in the Twitter files is just how little evidence there is that any bias was a part of the debate on how to handle this stuff. Everything appeared to be about perfectly reasonable business decisions.

And… that’s it. I fear that this story is going to live on for years and years and years. And the narrative full of nonsense is already taking shape.

And that narrative is just more meretricious mewling from the Party of No Ideas.

But hey, when the Gaslighting Oppression Party’s intellectual standard-bearer conducts a years-long campaign against American democracy while stealing top secret nuclear documents, dining with virulent antisemites, and calling for the termination of the U.S. Constitution, they have to complain about something—even if it never made a lick of sense to anyone, then or now.

RELATED STORY: There's a lot of ways Elon Musk could make Twitter worse. Let's give him a hand with that


Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.