Although her predecessor claimed otherwise, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Friday that the Biden administration did not interfere with Twitter’s content moderation choices.
During an official press briefing, a reporter inquired whether or not former Twitter General Counsel Jim Baker, a former FBI attorney who assisted with Russia-related investigations into then-President Donald Trump, had been contacted by officials. At every turn, Jean-Pierre stated that the administration was “not engaged” in deciding who to restrict.
According to Fox Business, she emphasized that “it’s up to private firms to make these type[s] of judgments.” Nobody on our end had anything to do with it. With certainty, I can state that we were not complicit in this.
This contrasts with the assessment offered by former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki only last year, who stated that officials were in “frequent communication with social media sites to make them aware of the current storylines detrimental to public health.” She said that banning someone for spreading “misinformation” on one main site but not another was unfair.
Reporter Matt Taibbi revealed last week that Baker vetted the files without the knowledge of new management before sending them to journalists, despite his involvement in the censorship controversy, casting doubt on the integrity of the initial release of the Twitter Files, which recount the social media platform’s censorship efforts before Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of the company.
The delay of the second tranche of the Twitter Data can be directly attributed to Baker’s determination to vet the files, which led to his dismissal. Baker was kicked off Twitter today after “concerns regarding Baker’s likely participation in suppression of information crucial to the public discussion,” as Musk put it.
Baker, a professor of law at Harvard and a former visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, had urged Facebook to hide the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election. Five years ago, the attorney was the target of a criminal inquiry into claims that he made unlawful disclosures to the media; the investigation concluded with no charges.
When the first volume of the Twitter Files was released, it revealed that Biden campaign managers often requested that executives erase messages, most frequently from the accounts of famous conservatives critical of the then-Democratic presidential contender. By the year 2020, “requests from linked actors to erase tweets were regular,” Taibbi said. A high-ranking official might inform another, “More to review from the Biden team.” With a return response of “Handled,” the situation would be “handled.”
Thursday night, journalist Bari Weiss released the second volume of the Twitter Files, which revealed that the business has secretly created blocklists, blocked unpopular tweets from trending, and aggressively reduced the visibility of whole accounts and hot topics without users’ knowledge. Former business leaders, including founder Jack Dorsey, CEO Parag Agrawal, and head of legal Vijaya Gadde, banned multiple prominent conservative accounts. Musk just let go of the latter two executives.
However, Twitter officials maintained for a long time that no censoring had taken place. “People have been asking us if we use shadow bans. Contrary to what some may believe, Gadde and I did not write a blog post together in 2018. When questioned by pundit Dave Rubin in 2020 if the company engages in “shadow restrictions based on political ideas,” Dorsey said, “No.”