say. >> well i would say, thanks, a major u.s. africa leader summit and i plan to hold the three african heads of state coming to a standard as high as yours. please give a round of applause. to a chief justice of kenya. [applause] >> thank you so much. we have a slight programming change. ladies and gentlemen, i apologize for the change, but senator warner is sick today but we have senator kunz coming instead so we will have senator kunz, senator young, and the head of ost b. at 2:10.

please come back promptly. thank you very much. >> fridays at 8:00 eastern c-span brings you afterwards where nonfiction authors are interviewed by analysts and more on the latest book. tonight steve case shares his book with the rise of the rest he talks about his efforts to start opportunities and spur innovation and jobs around the country. he is accompanied by a ceo. watch tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. ♪ clicks joseph clark is with us this morning. he writes for the washington times he is here to talk about the elon musk and his release of

the twitter files. why are they being called the twitter files? twitters blacklisting, if you will, and it sits in with his claims or his goal of creating a more robust environment at twitter. that's part of the reason he took over the platform, that's kind of his first foray into doing that. host: what do these internal deliberations reveal about that? guest: there was no question that they did suppress the stories of the laptop before the election. the new york post story was published mid october 2020 going

into the election. but these documents that were released to, and extensive twitter thread does of conversations going on around the decision. so that points to why did the executives make that decision to do so? there were also interesting pieces of that decision that came in. so we saw debates from a democratic congressman from california he weighed in on the decision as it was going on. it also reveals there was a backroom conversation conduit. people in politics contacted

executives to suppress it certain information they didn't want to take off on the platform. it was really, it was already known that this was occurring or that this had occurred on twitter. but this kind of discusses going into that. host: a tweet at elon musk yesterday it's the goal of transparency to build trust when i just release everything without filter? and let people judge for themselves including all the sections around current and future actions. make everything public now. guest: it's an argument being made not only by jack dorsey but some on the conservative side are also making that argument. imagine that this would be, how

would you do that? would you put this online somewhere and then over to the public to the go through -- to go through and ask questions and find answers. i get woody's doing. he's doing this through independent journalists, two very respected careers. they are going through pulling the information and telling a story through twitter. host: on twitter threats that are 35 tweets. guest: with screenshots of the documents that back up the statements they are making any there were words. so it is insight for the public to see this. elon musk said on a twitter q&a over the weekend that he was considering just a full release

of the information of the documents but if you can imagine you know, what would that look like? does he just pulled on computers for years from before he took over the popcorn? these are questions you could also release so much information that people wouldn't be able to decipher anything from it. host: number 24, here is a quote. referring to the hunter biden story is how one former employee characterized the decision with the excuse and within a few hours everyone realized that wasn't going to hold but no one had the guts to reverse it. remind our viewers about this new york post story right before the 2020 election. what was the part of it -- at the heart of it? guest: at the heart of the new york post story, if we go back

the story was derived from a laptop that hunter biden left at a delaware computer repair shop. it was turned over to rudy giuliani and steve bannon i believe was involved. so the key question that the insert in, or the question they got in that article is with president biden himself had any knowledge or any involvement in hunter biden's business. there were emails to suggest that he did know, he was introduced to these people and he had said on the campaign trail that he had nothing to do with this business dealings. they freelanced the decision. i think that's the more interesting piece of this. they were referring to twitter, internal policy about how to deal with packing materials.

there's a difference between the first amendment and twitter policy, right? obviously you would hope twitter policy guided by the first amendment that they are a private company. what you saw in this conversation was it seemed like there was this intent to suppress information and how did that intent fit into their policy? that's what they kind of freelanced. they found out that, hey, this probably isn't hacked material. this could actually be a legitimate laptop that was obtained legitimately. so the reasoning of this violates our hacked policy, the hacked materials policy kind of just sits there -- fits their true desire. host: what did do once they decided on twitter to try to

block the story? guest: most notably, they blocked or suspended kayleigh mcenany's account. she was the white house press secretary at the time. they would suppress the story, cancel tweets. i believe the new york post account itself at one point cut up in this. it was an effort to completely silence the story and other conversations related to the story. so it was a matter of keep this off the platform. we don't want it to trend ahead of the election. host: what was the company hearing from the biden campaign, what kind of requested the biden campaign have and other democrats as well? >> that's another interesting point. what we see from the biden

campaign specifically in the first thread is an email from october 24. so that is 10 days after the article was published in the new york post the still leading up to the election. while this was going on, while this decision making and the effort to suppress the story was going on there was an email between twitter employees signifying, or it stated that the biden administration had reached out to block a list of accounts that they said were problematic for some reason or another. that same emailed thread shows -- host: they were trying to have the company take on new photos of hunter biden? guest: it's not clear what down from the tweet and from the screenshot. but it was a list of accounts

they wanted to suspend twitter did so and responded that it was taking care of. one thing i should point out, while he says the biden administration did this they also did the same thing for other well-connected people in the republican party. he said that the term campaign for the trump insiders reached out to suppress accounts. same thing. and those were in some cases twitter employees would follow through. he said those were skewed in favor of them accredits our more leaning liberal -- liberal leaning people. host: lawmakers on both sides of the aisle reaching out, twitter

complied. they hear from government agencies? guest: that's another interesting point to this. i think more will come out on this. in the twitter threat he specifically said that from the documents he viewed there was no interference or direct injection of federal officials into the conversation. that being said, i just want to point out a couple things. we know from filing, and fec filing that a twitter executive in charge of platform safety made to the fcc -- fec right after the election in 2020. he said that since 20 he was involved along with other social

media executives from other pop arms and a weekly regular meetings with representatives, officials from the od and i. the fbi, the department of homeland security to discuss safety issues, misinformation specifically leading up to the election. specifically, the fec filing he mentioned they suggested there would be a specific hack targeting hunter biden leading up to the election. so there's no, in the first up of documents there is no back-and-forth between the fbi and twitter executives. but we do know that took place and mark zuckerberg also said on joe rogan that he did make the

decision to not put the story because there could be this

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ting fun and also a the best travel guide and the most optimistic travel guide to america that i've read in quite time. oh, you're very kind. well, let's get this started. in many ways, i think that this book starts in haii where you grew up. so let me begin the interview by asking you a little bit about your past, your life. then i'm going to ask you about the book and the stories you tell, and then i'll ask you about the lessons from the book. but let's begin with steve case. how did the cases end up in hawaii and what did you learn from growing up there that would inform this book? i grew up in hawaii and born and raised there of my parents were born and raised there as well as our family. it goes back really over over a century. i think they had sort of a pioneering spirit. so they go to this new place, which was long before it was even a state. i think showed that sort of an entrepreneurial know kind of interest and kind of pioneer and kind