Elon Musk told Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey that there was allegedly important data being hidden from the former CEO during his tenure at the helm of the social media company after Mr Dorsey had called for “full transparency” around the so-called “Twitter Files”.
On Wednesday, Mr Dorsey responded to a tweet from Mr Musk and asked him to publish all data from the microblogging platform, uncensored, in a Wikileaks-style dump.
“If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions?” tweeted Mr Dorsey. “Make everything public now.”
The question was in response to a thread of Mr Musk’s where he’d teased the release of yet another dump of damning intel from the San Francisco company’s internal documents.
Mr Musk, who seems to have an amicable relationship with his predecessor, responded by letting his fellow tech scion know that the information he planned to release had been strategically kept away from Mr Dorsey while he was chief executive at Twitter.
“Most important data was hidden (from you too) and some may have been deleted, but everything we find will be released,” Mr Musk wrote in an attempt to reassure Mr Dorsey.
In the original tweet, Mr Musk had been teeing up the release of “Episode 2 of The Twitter Files”, arriving just days after he’d promoted the first entry in the data dump, which came in the form of a long Twitter thread from investigative journalist Matt Taibbi.
Mr Taibbi released the thread on Friday. Embedded throughout the posts were internal documents that showed how Twitter had decided to handle the now infamous New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Since the first release of the so-called Twitter Files, Mr Musk has received pushback from the White House, who labelled the airing of the documents a “not healthy” decision.
“What is happening — it’s frankly, it’s not healthy. It won’t do anything to help a single American improve their lives,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday during a press briefing, adding that leaking the documents to Mr Taibbi amounted to only a “distraction”.
Right-wing pundits and Mr Musk himself have argued that the documents prove that Twitter executives’ decision to prevent users from sharing the New York Post story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election shows that the tech company was willing to play politics and keen to help get US President Joe Biden elected.
By his own admission, Mr Taibbi wrote in the thread that there was no evidence to support one of the claims promoted by conservatives, which is that the Twitter’s employees were acting at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I’ve seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story,” wrote Mr Taibbi.
The independent journalist, who left Rolling Stone back in April 2020 to kick-off his own newsletter, did argue in releasing the documents on Friday that Twitter had taken “extraordinary steps” to suppress the 2020 New York Post story about alleged ties between Mr Biden when he was vice president and an energy company.
Those documents also revealed how officials at Twitter remained unsure about whether to suppress the story. Concerns were reportedly flagged about how it had been traced back to the younger Mr Biden and if it was the result of a foreign government hacking into the laptop in order to interfere in the then-upcoming presidential election.
Eventually, the company landed on preventing the story from being shared, citing their Hacking Policy as the reason. It’s unclear what Mr Musk’s second Twitter Files dump will include.
