Friday night journalist Matt Taibbi posted a long thread about Twitter’s decision to limit people’s ability to spread the Hunter Biden story which had been published by the NY Post. As I pointed out, there were some really interesting parts of that thread, especially the fact that Twitter had decided to shut down the White House Press Secretary’s account even as they were privately arguing whether they had any grounds to censor the story at all.

Saturday the Bulwark published a story basically shrugging off the whole thing as a political sideshow for ultra-MAGA:

While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.

Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.

Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.

I truly, truly wish I were joking.

He’s not joking but he is playing the same kind of partisan political games the Bulwark is always playing. There were at least 36 tweets in Matt Taibbi’s thread but Tim Miller only wants to talk about one of them (#8):

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

So someone pulled up those tweets in the Wayback Machine and they were all Hunter Biden porn:

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background.

He concludes:

To sum up what we learned: Big penis, little news, First Amendment not under threat.

Musk and Taibbi have promised more editions of the “Twitter Files” in the coming days, maybe next time they won’t come up so limp.

His story apparently caught the attention of Lee Zeldin who saw it as part of a larger pattern surrounding this story.

First, the left lied that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was about Russian disinformation.

Now, the left is spinning the contents of the laptop as being about Hunter’s privates.

The truth has always been about the Big Guy’s cut and their illegal international $$$ scheme.

— Lee Zeldin (@leezeldin) December 4, 2022

That was certainly the more significant part and the part that has been the focus of most attention for years now. But also, it was a story about social media outlets shutting down content harmful to Democrats for no reason. The Twitter Files really underlined that there was in fact no reason for any of it. The people in charge seemed to be making it up as they went. There was also this tweet which indicated that at least one progressive member of the House, Rep. Ro Khanna, understood the problem as it was happening: “this seems a violation of 1st Amendment principles.”

32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files: pic.twitter.com/Tq6l7VMuQL

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

And then there was this tweet which also indicated a serious problem among other elected Democrats who were clamoring for more moderation of “harmful content” to the point that Republicans wouldn’t even try to buck the narrative.

36.Twitter files continued:
"THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”
Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it's "not absolute" pic.twitter.com/cWdNYIprp8

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

The point is, there was a lot more to the thread than the one tweet Tim Miller has decided to focus on as a way to shrug off the story. What’s really surprising is that Miller used to have a very different view of all this, and it wasn’t even that long ago. In a video he posted back in March of this year, he took some very different lessons from the Hunter Biden story and especially from Twitter’s decision to suppress it. [emphasis added]

Miller: Now the details about “the big guy” should be investigated for sure, but it was written when Biden was out of office and allowed to do private business deals. The big takeaway is that the media—

Kurt Bardella: Let’s be very clear here, this is nothing but conspiracy-driven Russian propaganda.

Miller: —and big tech response to the laptop in retrospect was abominable. Twitter banning the original story from the platform because of some vague claims it might be a Russian op was a big mistake. The platforms need to be much more responsible when it comes to the censorship of news, which should be an entirely different bar than when dealing with hate speech. 

Hey, that’s a great point Tim Miller-from-March. What changed?

Of course, Elon Musk wasn’t the main character/figure of hate back in March that he is now. Back then it was obvious that Twitter had been sloppy and irresponsible. Now that Musk owns Twitter all that matters to Miller is making a limp dick joke.