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Elon Musk’s promised Twitter exposé on the Hunter Biden story is a flop that doxxed multiple people

Jacob KastrenakesUpdated Dec 3, 2022 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Vergenone

“Free-speech crusader Elon Musk isn’t happy with Twitter’s years-old decisionto suppress a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just ahead of the 2020 presidential election. So in an effort “to restore public trust” in Twitter, Musk indicated last month that he would release internal communications showing how it all went down.

That arrived Friday night in the form of a lengthy and arduously slow tweet thread (it took a full two hours to complete) from journalist Matt Taibbi, who Musk appears to have leaked the documents to and coordinated for his findings to be posted to Twitter. 

Taibbi later deleted a tweet showing Jack Dorsey’s email address

Taibbi’s thread includes screenshots of emails between Twitter’s leadership, members of the Biden campaign, and outside policy leaders. At one point, there’s even a “confidential” communication from Twitter’s deputy general counsel.

The emails show Twitter’s team struggling with how to explain their handling of the New York Post story that broke the news of Hunter’s leaked laptop files — and whether they made the correct moderation decision in the first place. At the time, it was not clear if the materials were genuine, and Twitter decided to ban links to or images of the Post’s story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. The move was controversial even then, primarily among Republicans but also with speech advocates worried about Twitter’s decision to block a news outlet.

While Musk might be hoping we see documents showing Twitter’s (largely former) staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision.

“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe,” one former communications staffer wrote. “Will we also mark similar stories as unsafe?” asked another.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety at the time, said the company had decided to err on the side of caution “given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016.” Jim Baker, Twitter’s deputy general counsel, weighed in to agree that “it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been [hacked] and that caution is warranted.”

Musk claims this is proof of government meddling, but it plainly is not

The emails don’t show how the initial decision was reached — just that there were emails afterward in which leaders at Twitter discussed whether it was the correct choice. Taibbi reports that Jack Dorsey, who was then Twitter’s CEO, was not aware of the decision.

Musk seems to read the events as proof of government meddling. “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” he wrote in response to one leaked email. But the email appears to show the Biden campaign, which is not a government entity, flagging tweets to Twitter for “review” under their moderation policies before the election took place. Taibbi says, “there’s no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

Meanwhile, Taibbi’s handling of the emails — which seem to have been handed to him at Musk’s direction, though he only refers to “sources at Twitter” — appears to have exposed personal email addresses for two high-profile leaders: Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna. An email address that belongs to someone Taibbi identifies as Dorsey is included in one message, in which Dorsey forwards an article Taibbi wrote criticizing Twitter’s handling of the Post story. Meanwhile, Khanna confirmed to The Verge that his personal Gmail address is included in another email, in which Khanna reaches out to criticize Twitter’s decision to restrict the Post’s story as well.

“As the congressman who represents Silicon Valley, I felt Twitter’s actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns,” Khanna said in a statement to The Verge. “Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree.”

The story also revealed the names of multiple Twitter employees who were in communications about the moderation decision. While it’s not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of public-facing individuals or major decision makers, that doesn’t describe all of the people named in the leaked communications. And given the fervor around Hunter’s laptop, the leaked materials could expose some of those people to harassment. “I don’t get why naming names is necessary. Seems dangerous,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote tonight in apparent reference to the leaks.

Taibbi later deleted the tweet that included Dorsey’s email address. The one including Khanna’s is still up as of this writing. The Verge reached out to Taibbi for comment but didn’t immediately hear back. Twitter, which had its communications team dismantled during layoffs last month, also did not respond to a request for comment. Dorsey also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Update December 3rd, 8:28AM ET: Updated to add a statement from Representative Ro Khanna.“

Elon Musk says Apple has ‘threatened to withhold Twitter’ from the App Store

Adi RobertsonNov 28, 2022 at 1:58 PM EST

Elon Musk is speaking out against Apple.

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Imagesnone

“Elon Musk claims that Apple has threatened to “withhold” Twitter from the iOS App Store for unknown reasons. The news follows a tweet where Musk said Apple had “mostly stopped advertising” on the platform and a poll asking whether Apple should “publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers.” Apple did not immediately comment on Musk’s claim.

The news follows much more subtle signs of mounting tension between Apple and Musk-owned Twitter. Musk has criticized Apple’s App Store fee for in-app purchases, dubbing it a “hidden 30% tax” on the internet. And Apple App Store boss Phil Schiller deleted his Twitter account following Musk’s takeover, shortly after Donald Trump’s account was reinstated. 

In a November 15th interview with CBS News, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that “they say that they are going to continue to moderate. I’m counting on them to continue to do that.” Musk, however, has pledged to loosen Twitter’s moderation guidelines and floated the idea of a mass unbanning of suspended accounts. 

Twitter has long tested the boundaries of Apple’s App Store moderation — which has successfully pushed Discord, Tumblr, and other services to either hide potentially offensive content (typically adult content) or ban it altogether. Twitter remains one of the only large platforms to still allow adult content on its app, and a recent editorial by former Twitter executive Yoel Roth revealed that it’s sparred periodically with Apple over content like racial slurs and the hashtag #boobs.

If Musk’s statement is accurate, “withhold” could mean temporarily rejecting an update to the Twitter app or could involve a more serious threat to boot Twitter from the iOS App Store — a devastating potential outcome for Twitter.“

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How Ralph Ellison’s World Became Visible - The New York Times

How Ralph Ellison’s World Became Visible

"Before he became a writer, Ralph Ellison was an emerging photographer. Rarely-seen documentary images, gathered in a forthcoming book, reveal his lifelong engagement with the camera.

Nov. 25, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

“Untitled” (New York City), a photograph of men on a Harlem street corner in the 1940s by Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 landmark novel, “Invisible Man.”The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust

Judging the photographs of an artist who is not primarily a photographer raises a prickly question. Are you assessing the photos on their own merits or examining them to better understand the artist’s main work? With an artist like Degas, his photos can be regarded as preparatory sketches for paintings. But what happens when the artist is not a painter but a writer?

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” an eye-opening dissection of the Black experience in America, follows the unnamed narrator on a painful trail of disillusionment, from a small town in the South to a college resembling Tuskegee Institute (which Ellison attended) and then north to Harlem, where he finds employment with a doctrinaire left-wing organization much like the Communist Party.

The book is so searing and vivid that it’s hard to imagine its equivalent in still images. Ellison, who considered a career in photography before finding his vocation as a writer, operated in a different register when he was looking at the world through a viewfinder. His tenor was naturalistic rather than hallucinatory. A new monograph arriving next month, “Ralph Ellison: Photographer,” a collaboration of the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust, reveals for the first time his half-century’s engagement with the camera, beginning in the 1940s.

Parks and Ellison were good friends, and Parks, who was far more experienced, acted as Ellison’s photography mentor, just as Ellison guided him in writing. Working in black and white early on, Ellison later took up color Polaroids with diaristic profusion after a catastrophic fire in 1967 at his country home in Plainfield, Mass., destroyed much of the manuscript of his second, never-to-be-completed novel. Until his death in 1994, he took the Polaroids mostly from within the apartment he and his wife, Fanny, shared at 730 Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights, in the northwest corner of Harlem. One of a potted orchid on a windowsill overlooking a blurry view of the Hudson poignantly suggests a retreat from the hurly-burly of life.

But the thrust of Ellison’s black-and-white photography is documentary, much like Parks’s. He took shots of men in hats gathered in Harlem, children playing in schoolyards, a woman street preacher and laundry hanging on clotheslines above a garbage-strewn courtyard. They seem like sketches in an artist’s pad. Or, for that matter, like photos by Degas, which would come to life only when the artist, taking a picture of a woman toweling her back as a jumping-off point, compressed and simplified her form, and colored it with red and ocher to create what he saw in his mind’s eye.

What is so revolutionary about Ellison’s novel — a milestone of American literature — is that it spins off from the mundane and ascends to an incendiary, phantasmagoric plane that reproduces the surreal world of African American life as the author experienced it. Perusing these photographs, one feels an irresistible temptation to seek prototypes for his characters. A fine portrait of a young Black man with a troubled downward gaze inevitably recalls the character of Tod Clifton, a charismatic leader who, to the narrator’s shock and disgust, descends to peddling Sambo dolls on the street. Described as “very black and very handsome” with a “square, smooth chin,” whose “head of Persian lamb’s wool had never known a straightener,” Clifton succumbs to a policeman’s bullet, leading to the apocalyptic riots in Harlem that close the book. And because Clifton falls morally before physically, what seems to be self-doubt in the photograph resonates with the fictional narrative.

As I examined Ellison’s pictures, however, I wondered whether his documentary photography functioned simply as a supply of source material, or whether it was capable of transmitting the febrile power of his prose.

It’s not easy to do, and it happens rarely. But when it does, it’s thrilling. A boy is lying on a concrete ledge in a schoolyard. One of his arms is being held by a little girl, and the other arm is also restrained, by the hand of someone outside the frame. The child’s eyes and mouth are open in what appears to be not fun but terror. Which is it? In another photograph, a woman is being taken into custody by policemen. She is missing a few teeth. She could be inebriated. A blast of light has overexposed the upper right of the picture. The violence of the scene seems to have leached into the photograph itself, because there is a tear across the left side of the print. What makes these pictures remarkable is that they raise the unsettling question that reverberates through “Invisible Man.” In this crazy world, how can we tell what is going on?

The difficulty in capturing the sustained frenzy of “Invisible Man” in photographs is something that Ellison and Parks well knew. The friends collaborated on two photo essays about Harlem, which were the subject of a 2016 show, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. (The curator of that exhibition was Michal Raz-Russo, the Parks Foundation program director, who produced “Ralph Ellison: Photographer” with John F. Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor.)

Initially, the team of Ellison as writer and Parks as photographer investigated the first nonsegregated mental-health clinic in New York; because the magazine that commissioned it went bankrupt, the piece was never published. The second and more relevant photo essay was “A Man Becomes Invisible,” a Life story celebrating the publication of “Invisible Man” in 1952. The images in which Parks (with Ellison’s guidance on staging and captions) attempts to recreate scenes from the book fall far short of his best work. Photos of a Black man with his head poking above a manhole are hokey. Parks was a street photographer, not a creator of staged effects. His shots that attempt to reproduce the novel’s prologue, in which the narrator describes how he has illegally tapped electrical current to light 1,369 bulbs in his underground lair, look like the circuit wall of a lighting store and completely fail to capture the unnervingly logical reasoning of the narrator’s Dostoevskyan monologue.

Far more successful in translating Ellison’s words into an image is Jeff Wall’s “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue,” 1999-2000, a monumental and masterful recreation of a mind-blowing (and perhaps fuse-blowing) underground domicile illuminated by hundreds of tightly clustered lights. This cluttered burrow is inhabited by a solitary Black man wearing a white undershirt with trousers held up by suspenders. He is surrounded by books, records, clothing on hangers, dirty pots and dishes, electrical outlets, cardboard cartons and old furniture. In its evocation of stillness and madness, it captures the flavor of Ellison’s prologue perfectly.

Documentary photography is well suited to depict the look of a time and place. Parks, along with such peers as Roy DeCarava and Aaron Siskind, gave us defining portraits of Harlem. Ellison’s photographs add to the record. “Invisible Man” goes far deeper. It is a lacerating look at how the poison of racism has permeated American culture. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying, it conveys better than any other work of art I know the tragicomedy of not being recognized for who you are on account of the color of your skin. Ellison’s photographs are eloquent, and in a few instances startling. They provide welcome new information on how he observed the society he inhabited. But don’t expect to find in his pictures the equivalent of his book, one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. If the photographic version of “Invisible Man” were to exist, the pictures would most likely need to be staged, hovering between naturalism and surrealism, by an artist as sublimely gifted at creating images as Ellison was with words."

How Ralph Ellison’s World Became Visible - The New York Times

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