by Victor Davis Hanson The current “media” – loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and…
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In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, FBI agents would hold “weekly” meetings with Big Tech company Twitter to discuss content moderation, eventually leading to the agency warning the platform of so-called “hack-and-leak operations” by foreign “state actors” shortly before the company censored the Hunter Biden laptop story on these grounds.
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Late Friday, Matt Taibbi used the Twitter platform to publish numerous tweets devoted to the site’s internal deliberations regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story that most major media suppressed during the 2020 election.
The story, which is what it was, is based on documents obtained from the platform’s new owner and is a marketing coup that will drive traffic to the site. It confirms just how savvy Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is.
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Twitter has quietly halted enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policies, with Twitter users first discovering the change Monday night, according to CNN.
Twitter issued a variety of measures since the pandemic’s onset in 2020, including a policy that allowed users to report misinformation directly to Twitter to another taking action against tweets that alleged vaccinated individuals could still spread COVID-19. The policy, which has suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed more than 90,000 pieces of content on the social media platform, was praised by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy as a model for how other companies could combat misinformation, according to CNN.
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New Twitter owner Elon Musk declared Saturday night that former President Trump’s account will be reinstated.
Musk made the decision after polling Twitter users Friday. More than 15 million people responded, with nearly 52% supporting the return of the 45th president to the social platform.
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At an all hands meeting with Twitter employees following the departure of several top executives over user privacy concerns, CEO Elon Musk told employees that he was not sure of the company’s financial prospects, saying that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question,” according to multiple reports.
At the same meeting, Musk also told employees that if they can “physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted,” Zoë Schiffer, the managing editor of tech newsletter Platformer, alleged in a thread on Twitter Thursday afternoon. The news comes after reports that a variety of high-level executives, including Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran, Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner — who also confirmed her departure in a Thursday tweet — and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty all resigned Thursday in response to concerns that Musk was sacrificing user’s data security for profits, according to The Verge, citing anonymous sources and the company’s internal messages.
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Despite plenty of negative media attention this year on the now-dissolved Disinformation Governance Board, government collusion with social media platforms is ramping up.
This collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and companies such as Twitter and Facebook to police the speech of Americans requires a legislative remedy.
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Twitter began laying staff off Friday, with up to half its workforce expected to be fired in a cost-cutting move by new owner and CEO Elon Musk.
The move comes eight days after Musk’s $44 billion deal to purchase the company, and after more than a week of conflicting reports about the extent and timing of layoffs that employees considered to be inevitable, Reuters reported. In addition to layoffs, Musk is having remaining Twitter staff work on a “Deep Cuts Plan,” designed to save $1 billion per year in infrastructure costs including server space and cloud computing services, Reuters reported.
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The web’s earliest days were marked by optimism that the digital world would be an unfettered force for good. It would sweep away censorship and oppression, connect the planet, and empower anyone, anywhere, to be heard by the world. Over time, however, the web’s darker byproducts have become more apparent, with companies’ own research confirming the harms that social media, in particular, is having on teens. A recent report sheds light on Twitter’s role in promoting adolescent self-harm like cutting – and the company’s seeming inability to stop it.
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The Treasury Department is weighing whether or not it has the authority to launch an investigation into Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening.
Under the terms of the deal, foreign investors, including a member of the Saudi royal family, could potentially have access to confidential financial and user data, according to The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal. Treasury Department officials are examining their legal options to investigate the deal, but whether they were aware of this potential information sharing was unclear and the Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) typically investigates foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens like Musk.
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I have never considered that my patronage of a business, or the lack thereof, would make or break the enterprise. So, I find it amusing that D-list celebrities believe their threats to leave Twitter could make any difference when it comes to the company’s bottom line.
This week, stars who haven’t been relevant in years, such as Toni Braxton and Sara Bareilles, announced that they would leave Twitter in the wake of its purchase by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Braxton, who last had a Billboard 100 hit in the 1990s, said she was leaving because she saw “hate speech” on the platform since the acquisition late last week. Bareilles, who I think had a hit with “Love Song” in the early 2000s, claims the platform is “just not for me” anymore.
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Twitter’s sole director Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that he will be charging verified accounts $8.00 a month to retain their blue checkmark status.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
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Twitter has removed its warning label on a post from the account of Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon about his story on a whistleblower alleging ballot harvesting in Florida, following Solomon’s direct appeal to the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Solomon made the post Thursday that included a link to his interview with the whistleblower. The label was put on the post Friday, and as of Monday morning, it was no longer there.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would “look into” why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as “unsafe” on the social media platform.
“I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, “Election ‘misinformation’ policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report.”
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“The Bird is Freed!”
That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”
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On the day Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media platform flagged a post by Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon aboutt Florida Gov. GOP Ron DeSantis’ administration asking for a police probe into a Democrat politician’s whistleblower complaint about voting irregularities.
Solomon argues Twitter action Thursday night unfairly flagged the post – with the note “Warning: this link may be unsafe” – and is asking Musk, who has vowed to stop the platform from unjustly censuring content, to intervene.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told potential investors that he will cut roughly three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce once he secures control of the company.
The firm currently employs roughly 7,500 people. Documents the Washington Post obtained indicate that Musk plans to operate the platform with approximately 2,000 employees. Musk’s purchase of Twitter could reportedly close as soon as next week.
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Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, M.D. played a major role in COVID “vaccine” critic Alex Berenson suspended from Twitter in the summer of 2021, according to emails obtained through discovery in Berenson’s lawsuit against the social media giant. Gottlieb worked with former Biden White House senior coronavirus adviser Andrew Slavitt to suppress Berenson’s influential voice as the administration was preparing to impose boosters and vaccine mandates on the American public.
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Social media giant Twitter first blocked, then restored, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s tweet regarding the state health department’s guidance in which is noted a study showing an “84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination COVID-19 mRNA shots.”
“Today, we released an analysis on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines the public needs to be aware of,” Ladapo tweeted. “This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39. FL will not be silent on the truth.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is proposed to buy Twitter at the price he originally offered, according to letter from his attorneys to those representing the social media company.
The letter, obtained by NBC News, was date Monday and confirmed news reports early Tuesday that Musk had offered Monday evening to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, which amounts to $44 billion for the entire company.
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Twitter shareholders voted Tuesday in favor of Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform, despite his efforts to get out of the $44 billion deal.
Musk, the multi-billionaire owner of SpaceX and electric car company Telsa, has tried to terminate the deal on multiple occasions, citing the platform’s alleged security problems.
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Twitter was forced to cancel plans to enter the pornography industry after an internal report cautioned that child pornography and sexual exploitation would explode if Twitter monetized pornographic content, The Verge reported Tuesday.
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Professor Shmuel Shapira, M.D., MPH, the former Director General of the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), is one of the top medical scientists in the world, and since his “vaccine” injury, he’s become one of the world’s top critics of the COVID-19 shots.
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Twitter began censoring the word “groomer” after left-wing media watchdog group Media Matters for America pressured the site to crack down on the term, which they claim is anti-LGBT.
Commentator James Lindsay was locked out of his Twitter account Thursday for calling a Media Matters employee a groomer, according to screenshots Lindsay shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. He had to delete his tweet and wait an additional 12 hours to regain full access to his account.
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Twitter sued Elon Musk to force him to purchase the social media giant for $44 billion after Musk stated last week that he plans to walk away from the deal.
Despite deflecting the company’s legal threat with humor on Monday, Musk now faces a lawsuit in Chancery Court in Delaware, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Claiming that Twitter was in “material breach” of its agreement to sell the microblogging platform to him, Elon Musk said in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that he does not intend to purchase Twitter, invoking a massive response in the tech space.
“Today’s announcement that Elon Musk is abandoning his takeover of Twitter comes as no surprise to those of us who predicted the implosion for months,” GETTER CEO Jason Miller said in a statement. “But the lasting result of the failed acquisition will be permanent, and Musk deserves credit for further exposing the incurable, rotting, politically discriminatory culture inside the Blue Bird.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday announced that he was canceling plans to purchase social media giant Twitter, citing the company’s failure to produce information on fake accounts.
Musk sent a letter to Twitter’s board of directors on Friday announcing he would not acquire the company. He told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligation,” according to the Associated Press.
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President Joe Biden’s top adviser on environmental issues called on technology companies to censor debates on environmental issues and energy policy during a Thursday event.
“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, a former EPA Administrator, said during a virtual event, according to Axios. “We need the tech companies to really jump in.”
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Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey has exited the social media company’s board of directors.
The planned departure comes as Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk continues his attempt to purchase the company. The company initially announced last November that Dorsey would leave the board when his term expired at the company’s 2022 shareholder meeting, which took place Wednesday.
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A group of conservative investors plan to take on four of the “wokest” corporations at upcoming shareholder meetings over allegedly discriminatory policies in an effort to defend shareholders, according to a press release.
The Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Boardroom Initiative (BI) coalition member, will make proposals at Walmart, Twitter, Facebook and Comcast shareholder meetings held over the next two weeks to hire outside firms to investigate whether or not the companies are placing merit behind “equity” considerations, according to the release.
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Twitter announced Thursday that the company would be implementing a new policy for its users that would focus on making sure widespread “misinformation” was not amplified on the site during crises.
Tweets branded as misinformation during a crisis will be blocked out with a warning notice under the new “Crisis Misinformation Policy,” the blog post read. Twitter added that the policy would prioritize tweets with high exposure or from “high profile accounts.”
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Twitter is not in business to make a profit or to give people free speech, but to do “something that’s good for the planet,” a company employee can be heard saying in a secretly recorded video.
The new undercover footage from Project Veritas features Lead Client Partner Alex Martinez discussing the company’s authoritarian views on speech, and denigrating Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a “loony toon” with “special needs.”
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Two top officials at Twitter were fired on Thursday, signaling ongoing internal chaos at the tech giant as Elon Musk prepares to take over the company.
According to ABC News, one of Twitter’s general managers, Kayvon Beykpour, was fired after working at Twitter for seven years. The same day, revenue and product lead Bruce Falck announced his firing in a tweet that has since been deleted. Beykpour described his situation in several tweets, claiming that CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.” Falck’s Twitter bio now simply reads “unemployed.”
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Incoming Twitter owner Elon Musk said Tuesday he would reverse the social media platform’s ban on former President Donald Trump.
The decision to ban Trump, said Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur, was “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”
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Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition — which can be summed up as the world’s wealthiest person buying one of the most powerful social media and news platforms — underscores one of the big problems with Big Tech.
In the absence of modernized anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, Big Tech companies in the U.S. have amassed far too much economic and political control over society, and especially over the news and publishing industries.
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Earlier this week Biden announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be launching a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which will be headed by executive director Nina Jankowicz.
Katelyn Caralle, of the UK’s Daily Mail, describes Jankowicz as a woke so-called expert who’s against free speech and tried to pour cold water on the Hunter laptop scandal.
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The reaction among the press and tech communities to Elon Musk’s efforts to purchase Twitter has been nothing short of apocalyptic. A common theme has been that democracy itself would be under threat if unelected billionaire oligarchs controlled what was allowed online. Yet this is precisely how social media works today. The Musk controversy, like the Cambridge Analytica story before it, highlights the real issue: the fight over content moderation is less about online safety and more about who controls the digital public square.
Only a year ago, the media cheered the unilateral decisions by a handful of billionaires to effectively banish then-President Donald Trump from the digital public square. Lawmakers and media outlets alike proclaimed the societal benefits of private companies controlling the digital public square beyond the reach of government. In contrast, the possibility of a libertarian-leaning billionaire like Musk wielding that same power has been presented as nothing short of an attack on democracy itself.
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Billionaire Elon Musk reached a deal Monday to purchase social media giant Twitter for a sum of $44 billion.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said, per Reuters.
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Twitter will no longer sell ads with messaging that contradicts the United Nations’ (UN) scientists, according to a statement from the Silicon Valley tech giant.
“To better serve these conversations, misleading advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our inappropriate content policy,” the statement says. “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis. This approach is informed by authoritative sources, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.”
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Here’s your first clue Twitter is not really a business with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value – when Elon Musk made a public offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share (roughly $40 billion) the company’s management not only turned down the offer, but began to work on a poison pill defense aimed solely at Mr. Musk, who is already Twitter’s largest shareholder.
According to reporting by the New York Times, some investors and Wall Street analysts said that Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share was too low, and that he would need to go to at least $60 a share to appeal to shareholders. That would be 25 percent higher than the share price when Mr. Musk announced this month that he had acquired a 9 percent stake in Twitter.
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Twitter’s board of directors on Friday unanimously adopted a plan to stop Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s plan to take private the social media company.
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In a move that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who became Twitter’s largest shareholder Monday, will now be a member of the company’s board of directors.
“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing [Musk] to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said Tuesday.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech, has taken a 9% stake in the social media platform, making him its largest shareholder.
Musk bought 73.5 million shares worth $2.9 billion, based on the closing price Friday, the Associated Press reported Monday.
However, what Musk intends to do as a result of the purchase remains unclear.
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On Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) demanded that Big Tech companies Facebook and Twitter preserve all internal documents related to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Issa’s office sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Facebook communications director Andy Stone, and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The letters all ordered the companies to “immediately initiate document preservation for all materials relating to questions, inquiry, conversation, strategy, and response to the media reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop and/or its contents that first appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020.” The companies were additionally instructed to notify employees, consultants, and subcontractors who may have access to the relevant information.
Issa’s requests are in reference to an apparently coordinated campaign by Big Tech companies and the mainstream media to suppress the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. First reported on by the New York Post, the story broke less than one month before the 2020 election in which Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, was running against incumbent President Donald Trump. The laptop in question, retrieved from a repair shop in Delaware, contained numerous damning documents, photos, and videos depicting Hunter’s foreign business dealings through his father’s political connections, as well as Hunter’s personal habits involving drugs, alcohol, and prostitution.
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Radio host and TV commentator Dan Bongino built an army-sized following over the years on Twitter, with 2.4 million fans. In a few short weeks, he’s attracted about a tenth of the same following on President Trump’s nascent Truth Social platform.
But with millions fewer users and hundreds of thousands fewer followers, Bongino’s Truth Social account — like those of scores of other conservative stars — is creating substantially more engagement on posts than his long-time audience on Twitter.
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Twitter on Thursday suspended the account of Just the News CEO and Editor John Solomon for tweeting a story about a peer-reviewed study on COVID vaccines published in a respected medical journal by a research university that has worked with the both National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization.
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The infamous hacking group Anonymous appeared to declare an all-out digital war against Russia late this week, indicating the opening of a hacking front against Russian president Vladimir Putin amid his country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Anonymous is a loosely federated collective of hackers who regularly carry out digital sabotage of targets they claim deserve to be hacked. On Friday, a Twitter account purporting to represent some members of Anonymous issued a broad call for hackers to target the Russian government.
“Hackers all around the world: target Russia in the name of #Anonymous,” the account posted. “Let them know we do not forgive, we do not forget. Anonymous owns fascists, always.”
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Twitter Tuesday evening banned a well-known Twitter account called @DefiantLs, which posted screenshots pointing out left-wing hypocrisy.
The owner of the account, who has always been anonymous and remains so, said the account was banned for an alleged “ban evasion,” despite the fact that the account owner says he or she has “never had an account suspended so I’ve never had a ban to evade.”
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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).
MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna criticized Twitter and Facebook for censoring the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden, saying the story should not have been blocked.
“I thought it was a mistake for Twitter to take down some of this stuff about Hunter Biden, or Facebook to do that,” Khanna said during an interview with Joe Lonsdale on the American Optimist podcast while promoting his book “Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.”
The New York Post published a story in October 2020 detailing a meeting between Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden and a top executive at Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2015, relying on data recovered from a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter. Shortly after the story was published, Twitter blocked users from sharing the link and suspended accounts that attempted to tweet it out.
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