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Somebody's Lying: Remember Why the Federal Election Commission Rejected Complaints About Twitter Censorship?

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After the “Twitter Files” dropped on Friday evening, it’s become clear that someone is fibbing when it comes to the Hunter Biden laptop story — because the details are not adding up.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

When the New York Post first dropped its bombshell about Hunter Biden back in October 2020, the story obviously wielded the power to do some real harm to Joe Biden’s chances in the general election.

Of course, controversy ensued when Twitter took action to prevent the story from being disseminated on its platform.

As Matt Taibbi, the journalist who brought the “Twitter Files” to light, noted, Twitter essentially threw the laptop story into the same category as child pornography:

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The non-profit group Tea Party Patriots, seeing a blatant attempt to influence the election, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Committee shortly after the story was all but squelched.

That complaint was unanimously dismissed by the FEC in September 2021 when it found “no reason to believe” that Twitter had done anything wrong.

Twitter’s defense, which was sent to the FEC in a December 2020 letter, highlighted claims from Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, that he had had “regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.”

Should Congress investigate Twitter's censorship?

“During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said.

“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. … I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. Taibbi’s damning exposé makes specific mention that “there’s no evidence” — at least that Taibbi has seen — that the government actually played any role in this.

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In fact, here’s how one former employee described Twitter’s approach to censoring the Hunter Biden story: “They just freelanced it.” Also, interestingly enough, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wasn’t even in the loop on this.

So which was it? Was this a coordinated response based on warnings from the intel community? Or was Twitter just “freelancing” it?

There is mounting evidence that the latter is true.

But there’s one more significant problem: Twitter couldn’t even point to an official finding that the Hunter Biden material was hacked.

Assuming someone’s lying, they had better be keeping track of all these details.

There’s quite a few of them they’re going to have to juggle.

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Bryan Chai has written news and sports for The Western Journal for more than five years and has produced more than 1,300 stories. He specializes in the NBA and NFL as well as politics.
Bryan Chai has written news and sports for The Western Journal for more than five years and has produced more than 1,300 stories. He specializes in the NBA and NFL as well as politics. He graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. He is an avid fan of sports, video games, politics and debate.
Birthplace
Hawaii
Education
Class of 2010 University of Arizona. BEAR DOWN.
Location
Phoenix, Arizona
Languages Spoken
English, Korean
Topics of Expertise
Sports, Entertainment, Science/Tech




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