Released Twitter files show ‘election interference’ – Rectenwald to RT

The Democratic Party has kept a tight grip on the social network, the former NYU professor says

The release of Twitter files on the blocking of the Hunter Biden laptop story exposes the extent of the company’s ties to the US Democratic Party and its role in election meddling, author and former liberal studies professor at New York University, Michael Rectenwald, has told RT.

“We knew this, but it’s really official now. Twitter has been operating as a Democratic Party organ, essentially with Democratic operatives running the company before Elon Musk took over, and maybe, a little bit now as well,” Rectenwald said. 

Journalist Matt Taibbi published internal correspondence between former high-ranking Twitter staffers on Friday, which suggests they had concerns about the decision to bar users from sharing a 2020 New York Post story about the contents of the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of the then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. 

Twitter suspended the newspaper’s account three weeks before the presidential election for violating its “hacked materials” policy. But according to the sources cited by Taibbi, that would normally first require concrete evidence or an alert from law enforcement. Twitter’s official policies say that it relies on “a range of evidence,” including police reports and “other credible publicly-available information,” to determine if a hack has taken place.

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Taibbi also stated that because Twitter “was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation,” Democrats had more channels to request reviews and deletion of tweets they did not like.

Speaking to RT, Rectenwald argued that the treatment of the Hunter Biden story and Twitter’s other policies amounted to “election interference.” He added that it was “an in-kind donation on the part of Twitter to the Democratic Party without any recognition or acknowledgement, which is against the law.”

Rectenwald pointed to The Intercept’s October report that the Department of Homeland Security maintains a special channel to directly flag content on Facebook and Instagram as a recent sign of how social media giants could be exploited by the government.

“These are now the bottlenecks through which information is delivered to the public. And as such, their power is extremely important, and unfortunately, it is being misdirected entirely,” Rectenwald said.

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, endorsed the release of the company’s internal documents by Taibbi, promising more disclosures soon. When acquiring the social media platform earlier this year, he vowed to fight “censorship that goes far beyond the law.”