The latest batch of the Twitter files reveal some real bombshells: the FBI gave the company nearly $3.5 million in taxpayers’ cash to reimburse the company for handling mass “processing requests” – the taking down of accounts. This, in other words, amounted to banning certain conservative accounts and blocking “possible violative content” in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond. One leaked email shows a Twitter employee even gleefully wrote “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” 

According to US journalist Matt Taibbi, who was briefed by Musk himself, “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth”, with the express purpose of blocking accounts sharing alleged “disinformation“. Sometimes this even included accounts sharing obvious jokes…

The most damning consequence of all this is, of course, the censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. Twitter blocked the exposé on the grounds that it was “Russian disinformation“, just a day after their top lawyer Jim Baker had a secret meeting with the FBI. By chance, Baker himself happens to be an FBI alumnus. He personally told Yoel Roth to censor the story – a story which, it now goes without saying, wasn’t churned out by the Kremlin at all…