Elon Musk has said that Twitter, the platform now owned by the Tesla billionaire, previously “interfered in elections”.
The new Twitter chief, who is a free-speech advocate, said that the platform had “failed in trust and safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections”.
Exactly. The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections.
Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022
Musk, who was an outspoken critic on what he saw as measures curtailing free speech taken on Twitter and elsewhere, has also said he will release insider information on what happened at the social media platform in the past.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk said. “The public deserves to know what really happened.”
The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
While speculation builds as what Musk might reveal, many are pointing to one of the most notorious of Twitter’s censorship moves – their decision to ban links to breaking stories about Hunter Biden, even as the US Presidential race grew tighter and revelations about Joe Biden’s son indicated he was involved in dodgy ventures overseas.
According to the Federalist, one of the oldest newspapers in the US, the New York Post, published a series of exposés on the Biden family deals claiming that Joe Biden was caught lying when he claimed to never have spoken about his son’s business with Hunter “or with anyone else” – and also reported that Joe Biden stood to profit personally from his son’s business ventures linked to a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated energy firm.
Twitter, incredibly, locked the New York Post’s account down and censored discussion of the story. Facebook did much the same – a move Mark Zuckerburg has since described as a mistake.
The source for the New York Post’s reporting came from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop – and Twitter and others tried to claim that this meant it was not a reliable source.
“A study conducted after the election by the Media Research Center found 17 percent of Biden voters across seven swing states would have recalibrated their ballots had they been adequately informed about the scandals surrounding the new First Family,” the Federalist claims.