Twitter Fires Top Lawyer for Withholding Information

Twitter has fired its chief legal officer Jim Baker, new owner and CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. The reason is “concerns about Baker’s possible role in withholding information of importance to the public debate,” the world’s richest man wrote on social media.

 

Musk referred to a row around the so-called Twitter Files that the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published last week. Based on internal documents, he wrote about Twitter’s 2020 decision to restrict New York Post’s access to Twitter.

This happened because of an article from that newspaper about the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the current US president Joe Biden, which was based on hacked data. Of course, that would go against Twitter’s policy on hacked material, but the messaging service later lifted restrictions on New York Post.

Musk is a self-proclaimed champion of absolute freedom of expression and seems to have a major role in the new publications about Twitter Files. On his account, he warmed up his followers on Friday for Taibbi’s revelations. However, Twitter users criticized him because he admitted that conditions were attached to his publications but did not say what those requirements were.