On Wednesday, a former executive for Twitter admitted that the social media giant should not have censored the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the scandalous contents found on it ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The Daily Caller reports that Yoel Roth, the former chief of trust and safety for Twitter, made his remarks at the “#Informed22 Conference,” where he admitted that the story “didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.”
“Everything about it looked like a hack, smelled like a hack,” he added, “but it didn’t get there for me” enough for him to want to suppress the story.
The New York Post first broke the explosive story in October of 2020, after one of Hunter’s laptops had been left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The owner of the story eventually brought its contents to the press, revealing numerous scandals within the Biden family, including Hunter profiting off of multiple shady foreign business deals due to his father’s power and influence, some of which included Joe Biden himself. In addition, the laptop contained dozens of photos and videos of Hunter doing drugs and having sex with prostitutes, sometimes bragging to the women about his foreign wealth.
However, the story was dismissed by the mainstream media as “Russian disinformation” without any evidence, and refused to cover the story. Big Tech platforms took extra steps to censor the story, with Facebook altering its algorithms to reduce the spread of posts featuring the article. On Twitter, any attempts to post the original URL in a Tweet or a private message would be automatically blocked, thus preventing anyone from linking to the story. The Post was also temporarily banned from Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the story’s publication.
Roth is one of many officials at Twitter who left after Elon Musk purchased the company in October, vowing to reform the platform into a pro-Free Speech site. Since taking over, Musk has begun releasing transparency reports detailing the full extent of Twitter’s liberal bias, including the mass censorship of conservative accounts; Musk has also claimed that he has uncovered irrefutable internal proof of “election interference” by the platform.
Multiple polls indicate that, had a larger share of the American population been aware of the Hunter Biden story, they never would have voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election against President Donald Trump.