Half of politics is about creating narratives and driving media stories. The Hunter Biden Laptop story was an attempt by Republicans to manufacture an “October surprise” - a surprising revelation that occurs just weeks before the election which might cause the public to reorient their choice for.
This particular “Surprise” was actually just a rehash of a conspiracy theory that Republicans were trying to manufacture evidence for. Trump was impeached the first time for extorting a bribe from Ukraine’s Zelenskyy which would allege wrongdoing by Biden.
What he had hoped for was an official announcement of an investigation into Biden from Zelenskyy. But Trump failed to actually corrupt Zelenskyy, so he had nothing to go on come election time.
Cue the October Surprise. This laptop magically appears which appears contain evidence to support the conspiracy theory about Biden. It’s a GOP miracle! But the laptop’s provenance is shady as fuck and the contents still can’t be fully authenticated. So no one really trusts this thing except the most hardcore conservatives. Everyone else can see right through this thing for what it was.
This includes Twitter and the media, many in the media, who had been used by Conservatives in 2016 to distribute hacked materials from the DNC, and didn’t want to be used again in a similar way, so they didn’t play along like clueless idiots this time.
Conservatives were pissed off royally, and decided then to go on a holy war against Twitter, which had been brewing for a while as violent and hateful conservative voices were being pushed off the platform. But the laptop issue was the final straw it seems. Maybe Trump’s ban was the final final straw. These events happened in quick succession so it’s hard to tell.
That brings us to today. Since the laptop itself is a political dud that no one except GOP faithful trusts, Conservatives have decided to reframe the narrative as one of Democrats and Biden having untoward control over social media with the ability to oppress free speech through Twitter, which is not true.
So now we see more manufactured outrage. It turns out that despite what Conservatives say, Democrats don’t actually control Twitter. Quite the opposite is true now actually. But even with a conservative like Musk owning all of the evidence, he can’t prove anything close to the allegation that Democrats suppressed free speech on Twitter, so they pushed out these “Twitter Files” filled with cherry picked quotes and misleading statistics. Obviously this will help Musk to make further inroads with Conservatives since it’s clear he’s given up all pretext of being a neutral steward of Twitter who protects free speech.
This whole thing is a very twisted, so if you take it at face value, you’re really just buying into the narrative being sold by Conservatives. It doesn’t matter that nothing was actually blocked or censored or suppressed. The fact is the laptop is the GOP’s only strategy for winning in 2024, so whatever it is they need. their voters to be very very mad over it.