Since Elon Musk first started to talk about buying Twitter, he has suggested that if he bought it, he would reveal the inside workings of the social media company. Now he is making good on that promise.
If there is any single object that could sum up political divides in the US, Hunter Biden’s laptop would be it. Or at least, his alleged laptop.
The famous computer in question became a political story during the late days of the 2020 presidential election—but it was as much about the story as about the laptop.
Supposedly containing all sorts of incriminating evidence showing the misdeeds of Hunter Biden and his father, US President Joe Biden, the laptop—supposedly left at a computer repair shop by Hunter Biden—had been shopped around to various news outlets for a while before the New York Post wrote an article about it, released on October 14, less than a month before the election.
Aspersions were immediately cast on the story by a wide variety of figures on the left, many of them claiming that the laptop was a political ruse and did not really belong to Hunter Biden. The data on it might have been partly real (there were private pictures of Hunter Biden that accompanied the Post article), and it might have been partly Russian disinformation. Maybe the real information had been hacked from his computer accounts and mixed in with fake information.
(Concern about the provenance of the laptop had been heavy enough that neither Fox News nor The Wall Street Journal, despite their conservative bona fides, had been willing to publish the story before the Post took it up.)
Since then, other outlets have confirmed at least a good deal of the data on the laptop as genuine and used it in their reporting, including outlets no one would accuse of being conservative, like The Washington Post. But at the time, in the midst of the election, mainstream news outlets avoided publishing information about the laptop—which drew scorn from those in the Trump camp.
But even more scorn was aimed at Twitter, which for a few days would not allow links to the New York Post article to be tweeted or even sent in private messages. It even suspended some accounts—including that of then-White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany—that tweeted about the story.
Now Elon Musk has released the inside deliberations of Twitter in those days, as well as its contacts with people outside Twitter, to journalist Matt Taibbi, who sent out a series of tweets he called “The Twitter Files.” For some people, that information has been a smoking gun, with some saying they show a violation of the First Amendment.
But for many other observers, including a number of conservative commentators as well as liberals, the revelations about Twitter have not been exciting, and they certainly don’t show any actual violation of the First Amendment, let alone a massive one.
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