Musk Admits Twitter ‘Has Interfered In Elections’
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who only took the reins of the company last month, admitted that the Silicon Valley tech giant has meddled in past elections.
The admission came in response to a user on the platform highlighting Twitter’s mirage of “trust and safety” under prior leadership.
“The obvious reality, as long-time users know,” Musk wrote in reply, “is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections.”
Musk, who took over the platform with a $44 billion buyout in October on a pledge to restore free speech, also wrote in a post on Monday he would soon release “The Twitter Files.”
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk wrote. “The public deserves to know what really happened.”
While Musk revealed Wednesday that the company deliberately interfered in prior elections, few needed the executive’s public admission after the company’s high-profile censorship of blockbuster stories in 2020. As voters went to the polls weeks before Election Day, Twitter barred users from linking to bombshell stories that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures.
In mid-October, the New York Post published its first in a series of exposés on the Biden family deals wherein Joe Biden was caught lying when he claimed repeatedly to never have spoken about his son’s business with Hunter “or with anyone else.” The story was promptly suppressed on Twitter, which cited selectively enforced standards to justify its censorship as it locked the New York Post’s account for weeks.
The New York Post followed up its first story with another bombshell the next day, which indicated the soon-to-be president-elect stood to personally profit from his son’s business ventures linked to a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated energy firm.
As Musk acknowledged Twitter’s electoral interference, the company’s former head of “trust and safety,” Yoel Roth, who steered the company’s censorship, admitted it was wrong to suppress the story weeks before polls closed.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth told journalist Kara Swisher on Tuesday. “But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells. Everything about it looked like a hack and leak.”
The source for the New York Post’s blockbuster reporting came from Hunter Biden’s laptop left abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. By the final presidential debate, the idea that the laptop was some vehicle for Russian disinformation, which became an immediate talking point among Biden allies, had been debunked by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the director of national intelligence, and the Department of State.
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. Biden only captured the White House by less than 43,000 votes across three tipping-point states.
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