Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday weighed in on Twitter’s decision to block the New York Post’s bombshell exposé on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, saying it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Musk was responding to a tweet by Breaking Points podcaster Saagar Enjeti who had commented on a Politico story about Vijaya Gadde, the top Twitter lawyer who was involved in the decisions to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform and to censor the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In October of 2020, Twitter locked the Post out of its account and demanded the paper delete six tweets that linked to factual news stories based on files from the abandoned laptop of Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son. For two weeks, The Post steadfastly refused to remove the tweets, and remained locked out of its account. Twitter finally backed down on Oct 30, prompting The Post to emblazon across its front page, the headline “FREE BIRD!”
We’re baaaaaaack https://t.co/D39qdLGMdV pic.twitter.com/SkVtp4o9ew
— New York Post (@nypost) October 30, 2020
Gadde, according to Politico, cried during an “emotional” virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams as they discussed what the new ownership could mean for them.
Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change, according to three people familiar with the meeting. She acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership.
“Vijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who *famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the
@elonmusk takeover,” Enjeti tweeted.
In response to Enjeti’s tweet, Musk revealed his thoughts on the censorship: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” he tweeted.
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) April 26, 2022
Twitter engineer Conner Campbell clapped back at Musk, saying “that’s not what happened. Twitter had a policy about hacked documents. We applied this policy equally. The merits of that policy are debatable, but it wasn’t targeted censorship.”
Either someone informed Campbell that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were not hacked, (and that was a known fact in the fall of 2020), or he thought better of lying to his new boss. At any rate, he deleted his tweet. In another deleted tweet, Campbell indicated that he wanted to stay on at Twitter and was excited to get to work with Musk.
Appears deleted now but to be fair appears Connor does actually want to stay at Twitter under Elon pic.twitter.com/9LdOxF6TM3
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) April 26, 2022
*In March of 2019, independent journalist Tim Pool sat down with Gadde and then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast for a long conversation about the social media platform’s policies regarding speech and its bias against conservatives. During the discussion, Gadde defended Twitter’s decisions to ban conservatives for “misgendering” people and for tweeting “learn to code” at blue check journalists. At the time, Twitter even suspended the editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller for tweeting “learn to code” at ‘The Daily Show.’”
Gadde claimed that journalists were “receiving death threats and wishes of harm and other coded language” in context with the #LearnToCode hashtag.