FILE PHOTO: File photo of the Twitter logo displayed on a screen on the floor of the NYSE

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 7:58 PM PT – Friday, December 2, 2022

Twitter is coming under hot water after their efforts to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story was exposed.

In a series of Twitter posts on Friday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi released what he called “the Twitter files.” Taibbi said that a cabal of Twitter executives suppressed the story based on the unverified assumption that Hunter Biden’s laptop was hacked. They would do this by putting warning labels on the post and blocking it from being sent by direct message, actions used to suppress the spreading of child pornography.

The team would also censor accounts that re-tweeted the story, including the account of President Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany

The former head of Legal Policy and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, allegedly played a major role in the efforts. The group moved behind the back of Twitter’s founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Taibbi also noted that many in the cabal were wary of operating under the ‘hacked laptop’ theory but went along with it anyway. 

The same day the story broke, Twitter began its censorship campaign which caused chatter on Capitol Hill to began.

Democrat Ro Kahanna (D-Calif.) emailed Gadde warning that censoring the story could be a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“If there is a hack of classified information or other information that could expose a serious war crime and the New York Times was to publish it, I think the New York Times should have that right,” Kahanna said. “A journalist should not be held accountable for the illegal actions of the source unless they actively aided the hack. So, to restrict the distribution of that material, especially regarding a presidential candidate, seems not in the keeping of the principles of New York Times v. Sullivan. I say this as a total Biden partisan and convinced he didn’t do anything wrong. But the story now was become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been.” 

However, other Democrats didn’t seem to hold Kahanna’s sentiment.

Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel for research group NetChoice polled a group of nine Republican and three Democrat congressman. He found that Democrats were overwhelmingly pushing for more content moderation.

Szabo also said the notion on Capitol Hill was the suppression story and referred to it as tech’s Access Hollywood moment.

In the meantime, Taibbi says the hacked laptop theory requires a law enforcement agency to confirm and that verification couldn’t happen in the 24-hours of the scandal. He stressed that both parties used Twitter’s censorship tools. However, Democrats were immensely more willing to call for actions against content they didn’t like. Taibbi said more details are to come regarding the Twitter files, including shadow-banning, boosting, follower accounts and more.

Additionally, Elon Musk said he’ll hold Q and A on Saturday regarding the data dump.

President Joe Biden signs H.J.Res.100, a bill that aims to avert a freight rail strike, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, Friday, Dec. 2, 2022, in Washington. Biden is joined by from left, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Transportation, Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 7:18 PM PT – Friday, December 2, 2022

President Biden has ended the potential rail strike by signing a joint resolution. The resolution makes the nationwide railroad strike, which would have likely annihilated the American economy, illegal.

On Friday, the president claimed the bill avoided ‘an economic catastrophe.’

“The bill I’m about to sign ends a difficult rail dispute and helps our nation avoid what – without a doubt – would have been an economic catastrophe at a very bad time in the calendar,” he said.

The bill was passed by a Senate vote of 80 to 15 on Thursday. This came just days before the strike was due to begin on December 9th.The legislation will impose the tentative contract deal which was reached back in September on a dozen unions representing 115,000 workers.

Biden called on Congress to impose the tentative agreement reached in September, a power Congress holds and has used in the past to avoid both rail and airline strikes. The president defended the contract noting the significant wage increases.

However, 4 of the 12 unions rejected the rail deal and criticized Biden over its lack of paid sick leave, a provision he says he will continue to fight for. Currently, conductors and engineers can be on-call for 14 consecutive days without break and do not receive a single sick day, paid or unpaid.

The intervention to pass the legislation was perplexing for Democrat lawmakers who traditionally align themselves with the influential labor unions who also criticized Biden’s move to intervene.

Retired railway engineer and union member for 40 years, Jeff Kurtz, recently spoke to the Associated Press about the rail settlement. He called it a ‘disaster.’ Kurtz blamed the administration’s own practices for affecting the supply chains, not the rail workers. He went on to say that Democrats have been controlling the railroads for years and that the strike was only brought about due to their own actions. He stated that Biden is hypocritical for calling himself the ‘most pro-labor president ever.’

He also said the new joint resolution is just as bad as the destruction of PATCO, an air traffic controller strike that took place three decades ago. The PATCO incident involved 13,000 members of the union of air traffic controllers in the U.S. who went out on strike against the FAA.

However, just hours after walking out, then President Ronald Reagan invoked the anti-strike Taft-Hartley Act to fire the controllers if they did not return to work in two days. In comparison to the current situation, PATCO serves as a historical example of anti-labor legislation now being repeated by Joint Resolution 100.

At the end of the day, while rail workers were denied the right to strike, the new legislation offers better pay and improved working conditions, a small step in the right direction. Railroad strikes have played a significant role in the history of the U.S. and we can be certain this will not be the last one.