Upon Further Review: Looking Beyond the Biden Laptop Story
To the victors go the spoils; that’s the old saying, right? One of the spoils of victory in major conflicts is known to be how the “history books” tell the story. Vanquish your enemy and you have earned the right to paint a picture of them that shows future generations how evil they were and how righteous you are.
We live in an age in which news is delivered to us at lightning-fast speed and in undigestible volumes. With the technology that has enabled this propagation of information has come a trend away from thoughtful consideration of that information, a greater tendency to trust sources from where it comes, and less reluctance to accept the narrative constructed around the story. That technology has combined with bad actors to short circuit the “victory” that was once required to dictate the story told in the history books; the story is now being rewritten in real time.
This is our very first installment of Upon Further Review, our articles dedicated to revisiting news from the past, including but not limited to praise that proved to be premature, conspiracy theories that proved to be true, breaking news that proved to be false, celebrated policies that proved to be failures, and promises that proved to be unfulfilled. Today we are discussing the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s Laptop, which we will very briefly summarize here. An October 14, 2020 New York Post article made public the details of emails from what authors Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge described as “a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.”
This story went public and, having been forewarned by the FBI of upcoming “Russian disinformation,” the response by major social media platforms was to immediately limit the spread of the story across the social space, effectively and substantially censoring this story by making it inaccessible to readers. Twitter froze the account of The New York Post, disabling their ability to use the platform. Social media executives, such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-Twitter-CEO Jack Dorsey, later acknowledged that they did indeed take action to suppress the story and that it was wrong to do so. Twitter chief legal counsel, Vijaya Gadde, acknowledged the mistake to Congress, said Twitter changed their policy within 24 hours of suppressing The New York Post article, but waited two weeks to retroactively apply that policy and reinstate The New York Post account. The New York Post’s Twitter account was reinstated on October 30, 2020, four days before the 2020 presidential election – a bit late in the game for a groundbreaking story to potentially impact voters to the same degree as it might have if it had been openly shared, discussed, and honestly debated for the more than two weeks since the story was published.
What we have covered so far is a matter of public record on the Hunter Biden Laptop story and should no longer carry any controversy. Briefly, we here at MMitM assess the right- and left-leaning perspectives as follows:
“The Right”: Suppression of a true story compromised the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The Hunter Biden Laptop story revealed pertinent evidence about international business dealings between the Biden family (including Joe Biden) and foreign entities. The evidence confirmed that the presidential candidate lied to Peter Doocy in 2019 when Biden told the reporter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” The story provides revelations of his dishonesty about his and his son’s business dealings with Chinese and Ukrainian companies. These revelations likely would have resulted in a shift in opinion among voters who were on the fence about voting for Biden over Trump. Since that shift in opinion never happened, the actions of the players involved in the suppression of the story did ultimately influence the outcome of the election. Rather than taking the two weeks leading up to the election to publicly discuss and debate the laptop scandal, pundits allowed the Twitter scandal to dominate the news. As more information has come out over the past few years, the contingent of right-leaning folks who have been paying attention to this story feel validated after being accused of buying into a conspiracy theory for years.
“The Left”: This is a non-story that just won’t go away. Using your family name is perfectly normal and anyone pursuing business success will obviously take advantage of their proximity to influence and power. There is no evidence that the story would or would not have influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Absent a confession, there is no evidence of corruption. The laptop story is being used as a tool of the right-wing media to deflect attention from the ethical transgressions of Trump and his ilk. The 2020 election was certified by Congress as lawful, and we should all move on.
Can We Meet in the Middle?
As a starting point, we would like to propose the following: The federal and state governments of the United States of America have processes for determining the winner of elections and there will always be controversy surrounding closely contested outcomes. Just like contentious elections of the past, the outcome of this election was affirmed by these processes, whether you like the outcome or not. If the processes are insufficient, we need lawmakers who can establish more robust processes to protect the sanctity of our democracy. We need go into each election with an understanding that these processes yield results in favor of different “sides” at different times.
But the drama of the 2020 presidential election results has overshadowed what is the far more serious concern: censorship. The internet is a funny thing. You search for the definition of a word such as “censorship” and your search engine will return varying results. For the sake of this discussion, we will be using the definition of censorship from Wiktionary.org: “The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated.” It is that concept that we will discuss here.
Observations and Discussion from MMitM:
People who are paying attention see that technocratic forces are working in concert with government entities to censor Americans and influence public thought. This probably warrants another definition, this time of technocracy, taken from Britannia.com: “Government by technicians who are guided solely by the imperatives of their technology.” Our primary focus for the remainder of this article is on those “technicians” who establish, apply, and enforce the rules and guidelines in social media.
Numerous news outlets from across the political spectrum have independently authenticated the contents of the Hunter Biden Laptop, lending more and more credence to the original story published by The New York Post. “Authenticated” indicates that the news in the story, if not the editorialization, was indeed authentic. Authenticating news outlets include (surely the most biased will find one of these sources reputable) but are not limited to the following:
- CBS News
- Politico
Sure, these efforts to authenticate came well after the election, but it can no longer be argued that The New York Post story was based on anything but the authentic news that Hunter Biden’s Laptop contained a variety of documentation. Contend the analysis, but the contents are legitimate. What drove the most widespread and influential social media platforms in the world to suppress the propagation of an authentic story?
There are numerous examples of questionable application of seemingly benign social media guidelines. We won’t kick that hornet’s nest today, but we will focus on the release of the Twitter Files.
The Twitter Files Kick Off in a Big Way
Whether or not you are a user of Twitter (now known as “X”) or Threads or any other social media platform, it is conventional thought that social media is a virtual space where thoughts about all manner of subjects are shared, and discussions take place. Any individual post has the opportunity to reach billions of people. You have access to the population of the world, and they have access to you. There is so much potential to be realized through these incredible resources for communication – potential for good and for bad. Unfortunately, the potential for bad seems to have overwhelmed the potential for good, and the Twitter Files have shone a light on some particularly egregious and nefarious bad actors.
As we dig into The Twitter Files, please open your mind to the notion that this is not a partisan issue or an issue that hurts or helps one side of the political spectrum versus the other. This is an issue that addresses an attack on the foundation of Western democracy. So, try to take a step back from your biases and give this topic some thoughtful consideration.
It has been over a year since Twitter opened its internal records up to several journalists (notably, Matt Taibbi of Racket News, Michael Shellenberger of Public, Lee Fang, and Bari Weiss). After taking ownership of the company on October 27, 2022, Elon Musk permitted these reporters access to archives of internal Twitter, Inc. documents and records. Taibbi opened the Twitter Files discussion by sharing internal Twitter communications pertaining to the content moderation process of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s Laptop. Twitter had a process for determining whose messages and what content is permitted on the platform. Out of the gate, Taibbi showed communications and documentation confirming that the FBI and Homeland Security inserted themselves into that process while guiding the suppression of posts and censorship of voices.
Refuse to accept the truth exposed by the Twitter Files at your own peril. We are all in peril when any of us refuse to accept the truth about such nefarious activities that keep the general public in the dark about revelations as meaningful as the government working in hand-in-hand with social media executives to suppress information about a presidential candidate’s involvement with international businesses. The significance of this exposé is exactly the subject matter to which we referred earlier when we asked you to have an open mind. Whether you are on the right side of the aisle (and are appalled by the notion that government agencies coordinated with social media corporations to suppress a meaningful story), on the left side (and are appalled by the notion that then presidential candidate Trump colluded with Russia), or you are captivated by more current events (and perhaps are appalled by social media censorship or suppression of news about the Israeli-Palestine conflict of the recent months), you must acknowledge the threat posed to the democratic process and the damage to the sanctity of U.S. election process when the public is denied access to an AUTHENTIC story.
Free speech: it is either free for all of us or free for none of us.
After Taibbi delivered the first of the Twitter Files to the public, he and his colleagues, Weiss, Shellenberger, Fang, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson, continued to release story after story for months. Shortly after the early Twitter Files drops, journalist Glenn Greenwald discussed The Twitter Files on the January 4, 2023 episode of his System Update program on Rumble.com. In this episode, Greenwald notes the disturbing absence of coverage by the corporate media of these ground-breaking stories. He also shared the observations of one Twitter user who posted a small compilation of no less than four different left/liberal journalists using virtually identical language about Matt Taibbi, all using some variation of the same accusatory phrase that Taibbi was “doing PR work for the world’s richest person.”
As Greenwald points out, other journalists attempted to downplay the significance of The Twitter Files. He references a December 10, 2022 article in New York Magazine by Eric Levitz in which the author states “The Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn – that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.” Greenwald responds to that claim with “Do you see that? It wasn’t the censors inside Twitter constantly banning anti-establishment voices who were the ideologues. It was the independent journalist who decided to expose it.” We do see, Mr. Greenwald!
Digging further into the Levitz article on The Twitter Files, he claims that the recently new (at the time) CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, was “using his newfound power over discourse to promote the conservative movement’s demagogic narratives about Twitter and the Democratic president’s son.” He described the Hunter Biden Laptop as “sordid” but “mundane,” completely dismissed any significance of the original New York Post article on the subject and made the excuse that “at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value.” If it was insignificant, then why did the FBI and Homeland Security manipulate social media platforms into suppressing the story? If it was unclear that the story could be taken at face value, why didn’t pseudo-journalists like Mr. Levitz do their job and investigate it? As mentioned earlier, when corporate media outlets finally troubled themselves with investigating the story, they authenticated it! It is clearly a lot easier to dismiss it and attack other journalists who are out there actually investigating and breaking real news! There is a thread there that Mr. Shellenberger did us the service of pulling in Twitter Files Part 7, noting that “the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.”
Hold on! Wait just a second! The intelligence community knew about this beforehand?! Sounds a bit far-fetched, does it not? Is there a source besides the “controversial” Twitter Files that might corroborate this claim? How about IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley, who testified to Congress that “In October 2019, the FBI became aware that a repair shop had a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and that the laptop might contain evidence of a crime. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID.” We have now been awakened to the fact that the FBI sat on this for a year before convincing social media executives that it was “disinformation.”
Can we have a quick reminder about being open minded? It is hard to deny that this is a monumental part of the story!
There is so much to cover on the Twitter Files. There are connections among social media executives and even more government agencies. There is payment to social media companies for the work it takes to implement requests from the federal government, which liberal media outlets were quick to “fact check” and assure us that those payments had nothing to do with suppressing authentic information (though the fact check does not provide any documentation about what the payments were actually used for, so we can chalk them up as a late entry in the speculation contest). There are also emails showing that an FBI agent arranged for Top Secret security clearances for Twitter employees in July of 2020 to facilitate sharing of information about upcoming elections. With so many layers, this story simply cannot be captured in a single article. Fortunately, the Twitter Files team did an amazing job for us.
The Story Continues: Testimony to Congress
Especially after his role in the release of The Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi became well acquainted with attacks on his integrity, his professionalism, and his ideals and principles. But the most shocking was yet to come. Taibbi and Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 9, 2023. On this day, these gentlemen were treated with disrespect by House Democrats for no apparent reason (is this not a moment when we should be questioning why they would do this?). While he was testifying in Washington, D.C., Taibbi’s home was visited by agents of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Talk about brash! An arm of the federal government chose that moment to direct its weapons toward the man who was testifying to Congress about the weaponization of the federal government! Taibbi considered this action by the IRS to be “some kind of retaliation or an attempt to intimidate.” One would think so! Seriously, this is something you would expect from former President Trump, if you are inclined to believe the rhetoric about him being an authoritarian. But this was an agency governed by a different authoritarian Executive: President Biden.
On November 30, 2023, Taibbi and Shellenberger once again testified to The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Shellenberger again testified to Congress in December of 2023, this time to the Homeland Security Subcommittee for Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability on the subject of censorship. His testimonies are linked here for your reading pleasure: Censorship Laundering By The U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Note: This testimony came during a hearing on “Censorship Laundering Part II: Preventing the Department of Homeland Security’s Silencing of Dissent.” The first part of the hearings, “Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Enables the Silencing of Dissent,” took place May 11, 2023, and included testimony from Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School.
There is a lot of documentation and detail here, but these testimonies contain important messages and information. There is a lot more to the censorship story than what was exposed by the Twitter Files. Getting familiar with these testimonies is worthwhile.
Continued Attempts to Shroud the Story with Bias
It is worth noting that, while the journalists who brought us the Twitter Files boldly investigate, publish their findings in an apparently honest manner, and clearly attempt to serve the good of the public as they are repeatedly brought before Congress to testify, there are extremely liberally biased publications attempting to manipulate perspectives. The Huffington Post put forth an incredibly weak attempt to denounce Taibbi, focusing the headline on his facial expression while he endured a ridiculous line of questions from House Democrats.
Other biased sources have accused Musk of using his “handpicked” group of journalists of “using the Twitter Files to discredit foes and push conspiracy theories.” Quick question to the reader: If you had huge volumes of sensitive information that you wanted evaluated and made available to the public, but you knew that it would be controversial, would you handpick who was permitted to break such a story? Would you consider extremely biased journalists or would you attempt to identify journalists with demonstrated integrity?
Where We Are Today
It seems that the denial by the corporate media of the seriousness of the revelations that have come from the Twitter Files persists in the minds of those who subscribe only to corporate media. However, there also appears to be an awakening underway as people open their hearts and minds to evidence and truth. [Embrace independent media, people!!!]
It is time for one more definition. Published Oct. 19, 2004, a definition on liberalforum.org states “The definition of Liberal we use here covers the entire left side of the political spectrum – it’s generic for people who believe in individualism, freedom, equality, the social contract and rational evidence-based (as opposed to morality-based) public policy but often disagree on the application of these principles.”
Moderates and conservatives seem to have accepted most, if not all, of the story that has unfolded over the past few years as truth. It seems the liberals, those who 20 years ago claimed to believe in “rational evidence-based public policy,” cannot accept the evidence laid out before them. F.A. Hayek argues, “There can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control.” My liberal friends, you know this to be true. In a modern world that grows ever confusing due to the ubiquity of social media affecting and infecting the minds of the world’s citizens, we must now extend Hayek’s proposition to state: There can be no freedom of thought if the instruments of printing are under under government control.
It is past time for us all to free our thoughts from such influences. It is past time to hold our elected officials accountable for the actions of government agencies.
Bringing it Home
We started with a discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop saga and provided an earnest attempt at summarizing opposing perspectives on the story. We then connected this to what we consider the more important topic: serial censorship of authentic information by social media executives/employees at the behest of government agencies. We told the story of journalists who exposed corruption and some of the price they paid for it, including repeatedly being asked to testify to the U.S. Congress. We highlighted the bias that persists in the face of evidence and pointed to examples of how corporate media are complicit in the effort to censor authentic stories. And we provided links to sources for the entire story.
In many ways, this is a story about liberal/left oriented social media executives and employees enabling government agents and agencies to use their platforms to manipulate the perception of millions of people. The perception that this story is about the liberal/left is merely because the liberal/left ideologies seemed to motivate the perpetration of censoring this authentic story. But liberals are staunch supporters of free speech… or are they? Setting aside our partisan tendencies for a moment, we should all agree that this really is an issue that demands us to meet in the middle. After all, while this current conversation more strongly focuses on the role of liberals in this controversy, it would be foolish to think that there are not conservative entities out there that would do the same, or worse.
Concerns were sparked about Elon Musk doing just that when he advocated for the conservative/right contingent “to speak freely within the bounds of the law” on Twitter. These concerns persist and even Matt Taibbi ended up documenting details of Musk violating the Twitter CEO’s own reputation as a free speech advocate while behaving in a “censorious” (to put it mildly) manner in response to Substack (where Taibbi, Shellenberger, and many others publish) implementing a feature that was seen as a threat to Twitter. It is genuinely well worth a subscription to Taibbi’s Racket News Substack just for this tale about Musk. The takeaway is that we would all be wise to be watchful for the abuse of technocratic authority, be supportive of those who have demonstrated a determination to hold social media platforms to the highest standards and be averse to dismissing stories of censorship by social media, corporate media, or government agencies.
It used to be the liberal-minded people who refused to settle for anything less than absolute free speech, who challenged censorship, and fought against the tyranny of an authoritarian government. It appears that the liberal minds that publish and broadcast in corporate media are determined to spoil the hearts and minds of the good liberals of our society. They are intent on fortifying us against each other and using us as weapons in a battle against sane and rational thought. Censorship is one example of this; I challenge you to identify and pay attention to other examples because, sadly, there are too many examples that are taking place via “cancel culture” and based on “misinformation” that may actually be authentic.
In the meantime, please give some consideration to how you would frame your contribution to a thoughtful and respectful debate about social media content moderation. Whether or not you object to past examples of the suppression of authentic information, it is certain to hurt us all if we leave it unchecked.
Hearkening back to the MMitM core principle of love, respect, and tolerance for all, can we truly say that we are loving and tolerant if we support those individuals, entities, and social or political movements that promote censorship, that debilitate our ability to understand differing and conflicting views, and that consequently effectuate ever-increasing division? We are all in this thing together and mutual respect is absolutely essential. Standing up for free speech for all is a massive part of that mutual respect.
There is a war being fought to gain influence over your thoughts and beliefs as well as those of you your family, your friends and neighbors, and your political/cultural opposites. The spoils of war are still up for grabs, and so too is the history and the legacy that we will pass on to future generations.