The US government and its mainstream media propagandists are now reduced to whining about "divisive" Russian ad buys on social media to the meager tune of $100,000 over three years in an election where billions were spent by the candidates to influence the electorate. However, it has now been revealed that Twitter engaged in a much more substantial type of election interference by broadly censoring tweets with the hashtags #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeak in an effort to bolster the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

During the last few months of the 2016 presidential election, many Twitter users alleged that the company was intentionally censoring specific content – namely anything to do with leaked DNC or John Podesta emails, as well as pro-Trump content.

This one-time "conspiracy theory" has now been confirmed as conspiracy fact during a Senate hearing into Russian election meddling, as the company admitted that significant portions of tweets related to leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months heading into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett, on Tuesday, admitted in written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company had "buried" – a nice euphemism for CENSORED – 48 percent of tweets using the hashtag #DNCLeak and 25 percent of tweets with the #PodestaEmails hashtag.

"Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches," Edgett said, adding that "our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee."

According to Edgett's Senate testimony:

Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks' publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's Gmail account.