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The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by David Faris during a Newsweek debate about "the Twitter files". You can listen to the podcast here:
It's an interesting story that involves high level deliberations at Twitter prior to the 2020 election about whether to try to control the flow of information about this Hunter Biden laptop story that broke about 20 days before the election. So, in that sense it's an interesting snapshot into the decision making at Twitter. You can take various positions on the calls that were made, but ultimately Twitter is a private company. Elon Musk is doing what he wants to do with it, and the folks who ran Twitter in 2020, and did what they wanted to do with it, I certainly think there's a case to be made that they went too far in terms of trying to suppress the story, which I don't think is ultimately all that damaging anyway.
I think that the discourse about this has gone on long enough for me in that it's kind of bleeding into all of the Twitter fixation with Elon Musk himself, and it's making the site very boring to me right now because I've kind of made up my mind about this story. I don't think that the Hunter Biden stuff has a ton of purchase with the American people. Generally, nor are most people on Twitter. So, Twitter is currently consumed with a debate about Twitter and that's irrelevant to 67% of the country to begin with. The relationship to the Hunter Biden laptop story is evolving. I don't think that we know everything that we're going to know about that, but I think in general, the worst that I've seen from the Hunter Biden laptop story is some elite self-dealing that's not necessarily a crime, or trading off of your father's name, that kind of thing. If there's more to it then we'll find that out, but I don't necessarily think this is a top tier issue for the American people right now.
Republicans have been pretty clear for a while now that they intended to investigate the laptop and the various issues stemming from the material that's been found on the laptop. It's one of the first things that presumptive speaker Kevin McCarthy said was going to happen. The house judiciary committee sent that famous tweet right after the election all about Hunter Biden, and you know they have the subpoena power, they have the majority, and they can do with that power what they want to do: litigating what is now honestly pretty old scandal.
Most of the allegedly damaging information is from 2017 or earlier. And I'm pretty skeptical that's going to be substantively or politically beneficial to the Republicans to spend their time in power focusing on things that the American people don't really care about.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
