In October 2020, Twitter strongly censored the New York Post's reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Users could not tweet links to the story, the New York Post's account was itself shut down, and it was not even possible to send the link to the story via direct messages to other users!
Questioning of former Twitter executives by the House Oversight Committee revealed that despite having set up coordination with the FBI for years, the decision to censor the story came not from asking the FBI directly, but from following conversations of cybersecurity experts on Twitter.
Margot Cleveland, writing yesterday at The Federalist, reports that former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth acknowledged having participated in a fall 2020 exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute to game out how to respond to a “hack and leak” October surprise involving Hunter Biden. The exercise was run by Garrett M. Graff, who tweeted shortly after the Post story was published. “I literally wrote and ran a tabletop exercise at @AspenDigital this summer about this very type of incident—and then wrote about how the media should react better. Here’s the scenario and here’s my playbook,” he wrote, with a link to his thoughts.
This sure sounds like the invention of Guccifer 2.0 to direct attention away from the contents of the Democratic National Committee and Podesta materials published by WikiLeaks, and towards a supposed Russian hack origin. Knowing that the WikiLeaks reporting was on its way, the DNC got to work on creating the Guccifer 2.0 story. Looks like the Aspen Institute exercise was a parallel.
According to Graff, the exercise was designed and run by Vivian Schiller, former head of news at Twitter, and former CEO of National Public Radio (NPR). She weighed in shortly after Graff to boost his “playbook.”
Cleveland’s article details the string of “experts” and “fact-checkers” who denounced the reporting as being a Russian disinformation campaign: https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/09/twitter-execs-testify-that-their-election-meddling-decisions-were-even-flimsier-than-previously-claimed/
