• By 2020 it was "routine" for Twitter to grant content removal requests, journalist Matt Taibbi said.

• Those requests came from both the White House and the Biden campaign during the election cycle.

• Elon Musk, who hyped up Taibbi's reporting, has spoken out against the Biden team's actions.

Twitter in 2020 granted requests from both President Donald Trump's White House and candidate Joe Biden's campaign to remove content, according to a thread published Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

The long Twitter thread, dubbed "The Twitter Files," was hyped up by Elon Musk, the social media platform's billionaire owner and self-styled "free speech absolutist." The thread primarily included internal communications and other details about Twitter's controversial decision to suppress a New York Post report concerning the laptop of Biden's son Hunter in October 2020.

But Taibbi also touched on other content moderation actions, writing that by 2020 it was "routine" for Twitter to receive requests to remove content from third-party actors.

"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored," he said, adding that "celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party."

In one example of a request, Taibbi shared an email between Twitter staff that listed five tweets the Biden team had asked them to review. Another Twitter employee replied that the tweets had been "handled."

Taibbi did not include any details about what the tweets contained. Several of the tweets that were archived in the Wayback Machine appeared to include images of Hunter Biden that would have violated Twitter's terms of service under its non-consensual nudity policy.

Musk responded to the screenshot of the request, writing: "If this isn't a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment, what is?"