22. There is legitimate concern about how the political environment, and political sympathies, affect decisions that get made in the media or social media. And a desire for transparent rules, though this is more challenging than many like to admit.
23. One of the difficulties is that people are so eager to share and opine about "breaking stories" from a single source that haven't been vetted and should generate reasonable caution.
24. What I'm thinking about here isn't just Hunter's laptop, but also the (apparently spurious) allegations about Boebert, which I'm not going to repeat. Nobody is immune to leaping on things that deserve to be fully checked out before being treated as fact.
25. With all this in mind, I await further information as promised by Musk and Taibbi, which can always change my mind.
26. I keep seeing replies saying the FBI was involved. I see no reference to this in Taibbi’s thread. The closest thing is a reference to Jim Baker, who worked as the FBI’s top lawyer BEFORE joining Twitter as their general counsel.
27. I guess you could read into this work history whatever you want, but that’s different from an assertion that the FBI contacted Twitter and made a request or gave them instructions.
28. By the same token, Taibbi says that Twitter received and honored requests from the “Trump White House”, but from context I assume he really means the Trump campaign, along the same lines as its interactions with the Biden campaign.
29. But this is the kind of imprecision that makes it hard to rely on the information in Taibbi’s thread, much less the conclusions, without further context and details.
30. I’ve been forwarded this op-ed, which seems to be the basis for claims that the FBI player a role. It explicitly takes issue with Taibbi’s own narrative that the FBI had no meaningful role. nypost.com/2022/12/03/wha…
31. I think it’s reasonable to ask exactly what the FBI briefed and on what the grounds. However, there’s also a significant difference between the FBI communicating its risk assessments and concerns to media companies and directing them what to allow or not.