Former Twitter Exec: Suppressing Hunter Biden Story Was Wrong

A lot of American conservatives are aghast – and more than a little angry – that, prior to the 2020 election, the Democrats, their media allies, and even numerous former members of the Intelligence Community went to enormous lengths to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Those same conservatives are nodding their heads and smirking, now, as a few left-leaning media outlets have quietly admitted that the scandal – not that they refer to it as such – was legitimate. The social media platform Twitter was perhaps the worst culprit, retaliating against any of its users who dared publish details of the laptop saga. Now, even a former senior executive has expressed his belief that trying to quash the story was a “mistake.”

Yoel Roth, who headed up the platform’s “fact-checking” operation, told journalist Kara Swisher that the folks at the microblogging giant didn’t know whether the Hunter Biden story was true, but that “it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.” Which of course begs the question: Why did Twitter remove that content and, in some cases, suspend user accounts that posted it? Roth explained:

“When you feel a responsibility to protect the integrity of the conversations on a platform from foreign governments expending their resources to interfere in an election, there were lots of reasons why the entire industry was on alert … again, for me, even with all of those factors, it didn’t get there, for me.”

Swisher responded to this by prodding Roth with, “So, it was a mistake,” to which the former Twitter exec replied, “In my opinion, yes.”

Twitter Exec Fails the Irony Test

Ironic that Roth would talk about interfering in elections. In a poll conducted by the Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics – the results of which were published in August – 79% of respondents believed it was either “somewhat” or “very” likely that “a truthful interpretation of the laptop [story]” would have changed the outcome of the last presidential election and Donald Trump would have won a second term.That opinion was shared by 57% of Republicans, 48% of independents, and 44% of Democrats. Only 11% of those who were polled said they thought the story was Russian misinformation, which is how the left-leaning media portrayed it at the time. It seems, then, that one does not have to look overseas to find the most egregious case of election interference.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also on record as saying the suppression of the laptop story was wrong.

So, now there is a lot of crying over spilt milk by the very people who spilt the milk. It all rings hollow in the ears of Biden’s critics, of course, who know how very different the response would have been if one of Trump’s sons had been using the family name to peddle influence and score lucrative business contracts in foreign countries.

But it was something else Roth said that strikes at the heart of social media companies’ dystopian influence on today’s political, social, and economic discourse. Why do these people feel they have “a responsibility to protect the integrity of the conversations” at all? Whether it is election season in America or not, foreign governments are constantly attempting to use these online platforms to influence American politics – just as the US government is doing in those same countries, no doubt. Who made Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, et al., the gatekeepers of information that flows to and among the American people? What authority to they have? Why do they get to arbitrate what is truth and what is “misinformation”?

The tale of the junior Biden’s laptop and his shady business ventures – and not least, his father’s connections to them – is only going to figure more and more prominently in the political conversation over the next two years. Crimes may be uncovered. There is no more covering up this story. But those who are admitting, almost under their breath, that the story is indeed real will probably never admit what was almost certainly their true motive for trying to kill the laptop story in the first place: ensuring that Joe Biden did not lose the 2020 presidential election.