The Biden administration has insisted that it was “not involved” in attempting to influence Twitter’s content moderation decisions, nor colluded with former Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker to vet the internal documents Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made public through independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Last year, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the White House was “flagging” misinformation to Facebook.
However, during a press briefing on Friday, current Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that the White House does not get involved in social media platforms’ content moderation decisions. She also said that the White House did not contact Jim Baker about Twitter’s internal documents.
“[Was] anyone in the Biden administration… in touch with Baker either regarding moderation decisions that critics call political censorship or regarding [Musk’s] transparency efforts recently?” a reporter for the New York Post asked Jean-Pierre.
“It’s up to private companies to make these types of decisions,” she replied. “We were not involved.”
“I can say that we were not involved,” she went on. “And as I’ve said several times this week already… We’ve had this conversation many times in this briefing room, just the past couple of days. You know, of course, it’s up to these companies to make their own decisions about the content on their platform and to ensure… their own standards and policies.”
Baker was fired this week for vetting the internal Twitter documents that reveal Twitter’s history of censorship and stalling the release of the second batch of the Twitter Files, according to a tweet by Taibbi. Baker worked for the FBI before joining Twitter in June 2020.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk tweeted.
Jean-Pierre refused to answer when Fox News asked if the Biden campaign or Biden’s family told Twitter if the content of the Hunter Biden laptop was hacked.
Hunter Biden and his father’s campaign have never directly denied the authenticity of the data obtained from the laptop. However, during the debate with then-president Donald Trump, Biden said that the story was a “Russian plot.”
