Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Monday that he will soon be releasing files on how the social media platform has engaged in suppressing free speech.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk tweeted. “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
Musk responded to a user earlier this month who tweeted, “Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency.”
“This is necessary to restore public trust,” Musk replied.
The New York Post first reported messages from Biden’s laptop in October 2020, weeks before a presidential election. Social media giants, including Twitter, cracked down on the story to prevent its spread. Current and former national security officials claimed at the time that the Biden story was likely Russian disinformation and a veiled attempt from Moscow to intervene in U.S. elections.
Media outlets such as The Washington Examiner, CBS News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have confirmed the laptop’s contents and messages, in part regarding foreign business deals Hunter Biden worked on in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.
Twitter initially banned the Post’s story on the social media platform. Users were blocked from posting the link to the story or direct messaging it to other users. Twitter also locked the Post’s account for weeks, saying that the Post’s story violated Twitter’s rules against “hacked materials” despite lacking evidence that the materials were obtained through hacking.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admitted that Twitter made a mistake in taking action against the Post over its Biden laptop story.
“We were called here today because of an enforcement decision we made against the New York Post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent Twitter from being used to spread hacked materials. This resulted in us blocking people from sharing a New York Post article publicly or privately,” Dorsey said in November 2020 testimony to Congress. “We made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread. Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”
Story cited here.
