Background: 20 days before the 2020 Presidential Election Twitter banned a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, claiming it was Russian misinformation.

• In fact, it was real, and showed evidence of corruption involving selling influence in Ukraine, as well as the widely reported pictures of drug use and prostitutes.

Now: After purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk has released internal documents showing how the decision was made to ban the story from being shared, even in direct messages, and ban the account of the New York Post which broke the story.

How it happened: executives hid behind their content moderation policy on banning hacked material, despite no evidence the laptop’s content was hacked. This also does not jibe with their assertions that a general warning from the FBI led them to be on alert for Russian misinformation.

Also revealed: Twitter personnel took direct requests from Biden’s team and the Democratic National Committee to remove and censor certain Tweets, and accounts.

• The FBI held regular meetings with top social media companies before the 2020 election to discuss what content should be censored and removed.

Why this matters:

• Not a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech protection: a private company censoring on its own platform.
• A violation of free speech rights: The government telling a private company what to censor.

Bottom Line: The “deep state” or “cabal” is not always Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

Sometimes it’s just a handful of biased Twitter executives who find themselves in the right place at the right time to sway an election.

• Polls indicate enough voters would have voted differently if they knew about the Hunter Biden story before the election, that the results could easily have swung towards Trump.
• And it was the same people who constantly claim they want to defend democracy that hacked the 2020 election

Go Deeper: The game of “elites” is to control as many power nodes as possible, so they will have the chance to pull levers in situations exactly like these.

• With Elon Musk buying Twitter, they have lost a powerful tool of social control. And their freak-outs show how much power they feel they have lost.