Before Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media giant was one of the biggest meddlers of them all in our elections, and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds recently took the previous execs to task for their colluding with Democrats.
Donalds who was elected to serve in Florida’s 19th Congressional District in the 2020 elections and who was a member of the state House of Representatives before that, quizzed Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of public trust and safety, about its collusion with the Biden administration to censor users of the platform amidst the media’s campaign to pass the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
The Florida congressman was a member of the House Oversight Committee that was holding a hearing to look at Twitter’s collusion with the Biden administration to censor stories about the finding of Hunter’s laptop in a Delaware computer repair store. It was a story that was revealed several months ahead of the 2020 election, but one the establishment media immediately tried to squash.
With the revelations from the “Twitter Files” being released by new Twitter boss Elon Musk, we have also learned that the Biden administration was working directly with still unnamed people at Twitter and working to have the social media outlet censor tweets about the laptop.
During the Wednesday committee hearing, Donalds wanted to know just who and just how many people inside Twitter worked directly with the Biden campaign to have tweets about Hunter Biden’s laptop quashed. Unsurprisingly, he found the former Twitter chiefs reluctant to answer the question.
Twitter became infamous for censoring the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post which the paper published in October just ahead of the 2020 elections. And during his opening comment, Donalds noted that Roth had once stated that he was opposed to deleting the Post’s reporting on the Hunter laptop story.
Donalds asked Roth, “Who advocated for the removal of the New York Post story?”
Roth began with an obvious evasive reply saying, “The company’s decision to treat it as a violation…” but he was interrupted by Donalds who had not asked why the company deleted posts about the Post’s story, but rather who made the decision to censor the story.
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“Mr. Roth, who at the company actually went over your recommendation — because you’re pretty high up — who overrode you?” Donalds asked interrupting Roth’s initial reply.
“The decision was communicated to me by my direct supervisor,” Roth said.
“Who was that person,” Donalds prodded.
“Her name was Del Harvey, she was the vice president of trust and safety at the time,” Roth finally answered.
Donalds then moved on to his next question. He pointed out that Vijaya Gadde, the former company’s top lawyer, has said that Twitter “had no contact with anybody from the Biden team.” To that, Gadde agreed and testified that the statement was true.
But then Donalds brought out an email that was revealed in some of the more recent “Twitter Files” posts.
The email that Donalds put on display was dated Oct. 24, 2020, and contained the lead sentence reading, “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply from an unnamed member of Twitter’s staff was listed as “handled these.”
Donalds then pointed out the obvious: Twitter absolutely did have direct interaction with the Biden team, despite Gadde’s proclamation that they didn’t, and this email is evidence of that.
“The email is very clear: ‘More to review from Biden team.’ The response three hours later: ‘Handled these,’” Donalds asked referring to his poster of the email. “What does ‘handled these’ mean?’”
Roth then went on to claim that there was a separation between the teams that would interact with campaigns and those that did the actual censoring of tweets. But Roth refused to say how the recommendations from the two teams were handled.
Roth also tried to explain why some of the tweets were censored. “My understanding is that these tweets contained nonconsensual nude photos of Hunter Biden, and they were removed by the company under our terms of service,” Roth replied.
None of Roth’s replies, though, explained why Twitter execs have said they had no interaction with campaigns, when they clearly did, or how those interactions actually interlaced with decisions to delete content and ban users.
Finally, all this also brings up another important question. Why aren’t Twitter’s wide-scale deletions and censoring of tweets that were disadvantageous to Democrats seen as donations in kind to the Democrats?
Clearly, Twitter has, at the least, misled the nation about who told it to censor conservatives and how they did it, and at worst outright lied about it to give cover to the Democrats they were working for.
