The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Jake Denton on 'Twitter Files' and Why They Matter

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Elon Musk released bombshell news on Friday night over Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post’s October 2020 article about Hunter Biden. Musk linked to a thread of tweets, being called “The Twitter Files,” curated by independent journalist Matt Taibbi on his Twitter account, writing “Here we go!!” with two popcorn emojis. Taibbi’s thread revealed a series of communications within Twitter’s leadership at the time, and even involving government officials. “‘They just freelanced it,’ is how one former employee characterized the decision” to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story," Taibbi wrote. “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,” Taibbi wrote on Twitter. Since many of the Twitter employees involved in the censorship are no longer with the social media platform, the question remains whether there will be accountability for the former employees' actions. Jake Denton, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the significance of the "Twitter Files" and what to expect from Musk as he continues to lead as Twitter’s CEO. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, December 6th. I'm Virginia Allen. Thousands of Americans were glued to Twitter on Friday night watching the release of breaking news related to Twitter's role in the censorship of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden in 2020. And there was information in that story regarding a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. And Twitter censored that content. And many people asked the question why. Well, we started to find out some of the... that why on Friday? And the release of the news is being called the Twitter files. And here with us to talk about that is Heritage Foundation Research Associate in Tech Policy. Jake Denton. Jake, welcome back. Hi, thanks for having me. So Elon Musk and Twitter, they continue to make headlines, very entertaining.

So the news that broke on Friday is truly some of the biggest news related to Twitter, I think, in the history of the platform. Jake, let's start at the very beginning. Give us the big picture. What are the Twitter files? Yeah, so this is basically a collection of internal communications from Twitter predating Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform. So this is kind of implicating the past leadership.

And basically, it's a testament to their failure to really keep an eye on things. I think the biggest story, really, aside from these revelations about the nature of their censorship, is that Jack Dorsey was just enabled to really, like, keep the race. on his own employees, they kind of went rogue on him. And so when Elon came in, right, if you recall, everyone was shocked that he would just go through and fire everybody. But these are the employees that went behind the back of the past leadership and rolled out probably one of the biggest censorship operations in the history of our country and really the history of the internet. Wow. And I do want to touch on that point that you mentioned about Jack Dorsey,

because that was one thing that was fascinating that in this long thread of there was probably about 40-some tweets that were released that broke down kind of piece by piece laid out, this is what was happening at Twitter, and then led up to really breaking all of this news about Hunter Biden and the censorship of that New York Post story. And one thing that was said is Jack Dorsey didn't seem to be very involved, at least initially. Where was Dorsey? I mean, it's really a great question. And if you were following the releases of these tweets, right, they were coming out in basically like 15 to 20 minute intervals, people were beginning to paint Dorsey almost as a victim, right? But I think it's more of a testament to his incompetence,

right? He's not really a great leader if his own lieutenants are going behind his back and doing something like this. Maybe there were too many fires that Dorsey was trying to put out. And obviously, the platform wasn't in a good space during his transition to Parag, taking over the previous CEO. But it's really inexcusable. I mean, the 2020 election cycle is the biggest thing happening to the platform and the idea that Dorsey wouldn't know. that this big censorship, this collaboration between the DNC and Twitter's trust and safety team was happening is crazy. I mean, that should have never happened.

Now, one of the things that was very fascinating that was released was that there was some email exchanges that took place between a very high official at Twitter and a Democrat congressman Rokana. And essentially, the congressman, the Democrat congressman expressed some concerns that this censorship was a violation of the First Amendment. And the exchange there back and forth was interesting. And then even watching the press's reaction, the Atlantic published a piece saying, titled Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, don't understand the First Amendment. So did Twitter, in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, did they violate the First Amendment?

Yes or no? Well, it's kind of a maybe, right? I mean, it's a social media platform, and our lack of regulation has basically allowed them, empowered them to censor Americans. And, you know, we can say it's a violation of the First Amendment, but when there's no basically desire from our legislators or regulators to protect the First Amendment, it's like, what does that really even mean anymore? We've had violations of the First Amendment on social media since basically the origins of the

platforms, and there's essentially no cases. of us going after these companies from stripping the voice from Americans. And so it's really difficult to say if it even matters in the context of what we've reduced the First Amendment down to. If you can't go on and voice your opinion and no one's going to protect that, even if it is a violation of the First Amendment, it's like, what does that even mean anymore? Wow. So in addition to so much information being released about Hunter Biden and that laptop and the

censorship over that story. There was also just some general information released in this long, long thread about how Twitter operated before Elon Musk took over. One of the tweets reads, by 2020 requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another, more to review from the Biden team, and the reply would come back handled. What do you make of this, Jake? Well, it's really interesting because, you know, it says mortar review, which implies that there were previous communications. This is, you know, a routine procedure. They weren't caught off guard. They didn't need more context to that email. So to me, what it signals is that this is like a longstanding program in which, you know, the DNC, the Biden campaign, any other number of campaigns, there was actually

a report that Katie Hobbs was doing the same thing in Arizona. And so, I mean, it sounds like a very well established kind of known thing within the political operative world that you can reach out to Twitter and they'll just handle, you know, the dissent or the commentary that your candidate doesn't like. And so I think it really is just a testament, you know, as we were previously talking about, to Dorsey's incompetence. I mean, how do you allow for this to happen? You can't plead ignorance when you're that high of an executive. You're running the ship. It's really concerning. Do any of the people who were directly involved in the censorship in the activity of, you know, fielding and censoring content, apparently what appears to be

for the Biden team. Do any of them still work at Twitter that we know of? So a lot of the turnover has already occurred, right? So we had Vijay Gad, who was like the chief legal officer. The main essentially power behind getting Trump off of the platform was one of the first to be fired. Yowell Roth is now out. He was another one of these key architects. But, you know, some of these press type staffers, some of these government relations folks are all still kind of avoiding this inevitable firing. I don't think by the time, you know, Twitter files, 23, 4, whatever we end up getting, rolls around that some of these names won't be gone.

I think it's pretty likely that the turnover occurs. It's just he's prioritized essentially the worst of the worst and has worked his way down. So, I mean, we'll likely see a lot of turnover with the DC team of Twitter and kind of the affiliated folks. I don't think they survived this. Yeah, wow. Now, I want to touch back and talk a little bit more about the Hunter Biden laptop story and the censorship of it. So we saw how the whole thing unraveled in many ways on Twitter and sort of this frenzy of back-and-forth emails that took place right after the censorship in October of 2020. And information, the journalist who broke this on Twitter, really per Elon Musk.

One of the things that he noted was he spoke with someone, a former Twitter employee who said really the response from Twitter was them freelancing it. They were almost sort of trying to figure it out as they went along. And he added, 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. So, you know, the initial response from Twitter was they had concerns that this Hunter Biden laptop story was hacked material. But now we have claims being made that, no, that was just sort of all a big, a big lie in many ways.

Yeah, it's actually some of those parts in the Twitter files read almost like comedy, right? I mean, you're scrolling through and you have Twitter employees basically saying, you know, can we do this? Like, are we allowed to, you know, is this hold up if we have another story of this kind? are we going to do the same thing? And I think they were really just figuring it out as they went on. No one was really looking over them, right? I think it's cited, you know, the lack of oversight is really how this came about. And I think it's absolutely true.

You know, there's actually a funny side story to this with reports that essentially the FBI warned Twitter that a, you know, hacked story is going to be coming about and that, you know, they should keep an eye on it. And it's very funny to think of the word warned, right? because it has a couple of different meetings warned as then like, you know, we should be concerned about this story or also warned as then you should take action on this, right? It's hard to really discern the way it's being reported what that meant in that context. And so I think the government angle here is going to also be quite interesting. We know that Facebook was working with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security throughout the 2020 cycle.

And that's definitely not an isolated instance. you have to assume that those communications went out, you know, to Twitter and their other social media platforms. And I think we're probably going to see within the next few drops the extent to which, whether it be the White House or affiliated executive branch agencies, we're in contact with Twitter. So what does accountability then look like in this situation? Because as you say, so many of these folks who were so involved in this, they no longer work at Twitter.

Yeah, well, it's really tough to say because there's no shortage of essentially stories of corporate malfeasance within Silicon Valley, whether that be executives, you know, compromising user data through incompetent cybersecurity procedures or, you know, the silencing of ordinary Americans. But we've never really had corporate accountability for these Silicon Valley folks. There's no urgency on either side of the aisle to have these people actually held accountable. You know, when they get before Congress for a hearing, they basically dodge every question or just outright lie to the American people about the nature of whether it be the censorship, or what's happening at these companies.

And so I think it's actually very tough to say what comes next because it's basically just been a slap on the wrist or turning the blind eye up to this point. But I think the American people are growing impatient and they want more. And so who's going to give it to them? I don't think it'll be Biden's DOJ, which basically leaves the Republican majority

in the upcoming Congress and the House side to provide some form of justice here. But really tough to say if it's going to be achievable. Now, what do you think was must strategy in using Twitter to release all this information, the very platform that was responsible for the censorship in the first place? Yeah, it's very interesting because I think it's all framed around bringing basically transparency back to the platform in order to restore trust. If you recall just a few weeks ago, the FTX story came out. And I think what people saw very quickly is that when Twitter isn't being censored, you know, when citizen journalism can actually occur, the folks on Twitter actually. actually do a much better job honestly reporting on these stories that implicate corporate media

and kind of the ruling class, then these establishment brands, whether that be the New York Times or any other publication, we can trust the individual reporters on this platform a lot more than, you know, a blue-checked kind of authentic journalist who, you know, went to Ivy and got their credential. We'd rather trust, you know, just the guy who lives in the middle of America and really wants to get answers. And so I think, really, doing this through a substack journalist, someone who isn't really bound by a corporate interest, we're able to kind of trust the reporting and the spin on it a lot more than essentially these intertwined kind of supporting characters from the original story, right?

I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop story didn't just get censored on Twitter. You couldn't find it on Google. You couldn't find it in any publication. So why go back to those people and have them report to us? Now, what happens next? What can we expect? has must said he's going to be releasing more of this type of information? Yeah, so if we just think back, I mean, 2020 was really just the tip of the iceberg.

That was the beginning of essentially all of the censorship. We quickly jumped into the COVID era, which was probably where this really caught, you know, stride here. They figured out how to censor. They were doing it more efficiently. If you recall, you know, just not only about two months ago, we had reports from the Missouri Attorney General, Eric Schmidt, basically saying that the White House is reaching out to Facebook and telling them, you know, take down these posts. If you don't think that was happening with Twitter, I mean, you're definitely mistaken. There were 100% outreach from the White House.

And so it's really tough to say what he'll prioritize next in the releases, but there will be no shortage of content. I think the American people definitely want to know about COVID. And I think Elon will probably give it to him. Yeah. Well, we're going to be watching this as it continues to unfold. Jake Dent of the Heritage Foundation. Thank you so much for your time today. Absolutely.

Thank you for having me. We get it. With big media bias, it's hard to find accurate honest news. That's why we've put together the Morning Bell newsletter, a compilation of the top stories and conservative commentary. To subscribe, just head to DailySignal.com slash morning bell subscription or visitdailysignal.com and click on the connect button at the top of the page. So fascinating to hear Jake break that down for us today. Thank you all so much for joining for our conversation on Twitter and Elon Musk. We're going to, as we said, continue to bring you all information as likely more information is going to be released on Twitter by Elon Musk regarding

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