Trump calls for the ‘repeal’ of the constitution over the leak of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter files’

Former President Donald Trump called for the “cancellation” of articles of the Constitution on Saturday after a series of messages between leaders of the social media platform were leaked in “Twitter files” ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump suggested the contents of the leak warranted a full re-election or simply a coup d’etat that would install him as president.

“A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the repeal of every rule, regulation, and article, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, the platform he launched after being kicked from Twitter in early 2021 became.

In a follow-up post, he added, “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES AN UNPRECEDENTED HEALING!”

Author Matt Taibbi posted on Friday night a thread of dozens of tweets he captioned “THE TWITTER FILES” and claimed his story offered bombastic revelations about free speech on Twitter. Some conservatives claim that Taibbi’s tweets prove Twitter unduly influenced the outcome of the last presidential election, although history has been panned like overhyped and misleading.

The allegedly leaked messages discussed content moderation decisions – specifically how Twitter would deal with the New York Post’s story about the filthy contents of a laptop reportedly owned by Hunter Biden. The contents of the laptop ranged from explicit photos of Joe Biden’s son and his romantic partners to emails about his work as a consultant to Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

At the time, many intelligence experts considered the story’s provenance highly suspect given the threat of foreign disinformation in the weeks leading up to a monumental election. A group of more than 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declaring that the laptop story “has all the classic hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.” Tech companies that were criticized for letting disinformation flow freely on major social platforms during the 2016 presidential campaign didn’t want to make the same mistakes.

Since then, at least some of the laptop’s information has been authenticated by news outlets not owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

But despite all the uncertainty at the end of 2020, Twitter took a relatively extreme approach to working through the laptop story: the platform blocked it. Sharing a link to the New York Post story meant your account could be suspended until you deleted it, which happened to then-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

Which brings us back to the Twitter Files leak.

Twitter’s new overlord, billionaire Elon Musk, had been teasing and hyping the thread with popcorn emojis for the hours beforehand, writing, “This is going to be awesome.”

Taibbi claimed he was given access to “thousands of internal documents obtained from sources at Twitter.” In what he promised to be the first of a series of episodes of “The Twitter Files,” Taibbi shared screenshots of conversations allegedly held by senior Twitter executives.

Management decided to say the New York Post story violated their rules against hacked materials, although they later reversed that decision. An email allegedly showed Twitter executives listening to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) say the suppression of the post story has angered lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and violates First Amendment principles.

Elsewhere in Taibbi’s thread, some conservatives reacted with particular outrage when he shared what appeared to be a request from someone on Joe Biden’s team. Back then, Biden was just a presidential candidate, and someone had asked Twitter to remove several tweets. While some responded as if collusion was involved, the tweets in question contained nude photos of the president’s son taken from his laptop.

The whole “Twitter Files” saga seems to make one thing clear: the complicated need for content moderation on major Internet platforms.