A day after releasing a bombshell report about the political censorship that took place at Twitter before he took the helm, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that he will be revealing more “smoking guns” about what went on behind the scenes at the social media platform in the future.
Musk said that he hopes by exposing the way Twitter suppressed information in cases like the expose by the New York Post on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the presidential election in 2020, it will force the mainstream media to make a greater commitment to telling the truth.
In a live question-and-answer session on Twitter Space with tens of thousands of users, Musk promised: “We’re just gonna put all the information out there try to get a clean slate we will be iteratively better and it will force other media companies to also be more truthful or else they’ll lose their readership.”
Last week, journalist Matt Taibbi published a series of internal communications from Twitter revealing conversations between Democratic insiders and representatives of the social media platform aimed at suppressing coverage of the Post's incriminating story about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the election.
Although Musk said that there are more smoking guns at Twitter that he intends to share with the world, he did not say when the information would be released.
He did note, however, that he had not been looking through the files personally. Instead, he has handed them over to Taibbi and former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss. He said that the documents indicate “a very different standard applied to Republican candidates in the US versus a Democrat candidates.”
“I’m not saying this is definitely the case. There appears to have been a double standard where Democrats were not censored … and Republicans were and it was and I think this is frankly obvious to anyone who uses Twitter.”
Pointing out that political contributions from Twitter were more than 99% Democrat, he noted: “It’s frankly the behavior that is to be expected from an organization that is based in San Francisco which is far left.”
He added that this type of behavior could be expected from a company that he says he is “essentially a distillation of San Francisco politics.”
Former Twitter execs could be held accountable
When Republicans take control of the House of Representatives next month, the former Head of Legal, Policy and Trust at Twitter, Vijaya Gadde, will be questioned by the House Judiciary Committee to find out more about her role in suppressing the New York Post story.
Gadde is said to have played a vital role in keeping the Post's coverage of the Hunter Biden story from making its way to Twitter users. The former executive also played a crucial role in banning former President Trump from using the platform.
Musk fired Gadde shortly after purchasing Twitter in October. While still working for Twitter, Gadde obtained an influential post with the Biden administration serving on an advisory committee for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
According to Taibbi’s report, top-level executives at Twitter decided to label the laptop story as “hacked material” despite not having any evidence to this effect; several mainstream media outlets have since admitted that the story is true. Twitter repeatedly caved to demands by Democrats to remove all discussions of the report from the platform at the time it was released, including removing links to the story that users shared and posting warnings that reading them may be “unsafe.”
Not surprisingly, the story exposing Twitter's politically motivated censorship of the story was not covered by the New York Times or the Washington Post, prompting Musk to write on Twitter: “The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far-left politicians.”
Taibbi also revealed that actor James Woods was targeted for censorship by Twitter at the request of the Democratic National Committee.
Although it is encouraging to see this behavior finally being exposed, what happened at Twitter could well be just the tip of the iceberg. Google and Facebook have long been accused of similar acts, but it seems unlikely they will be held accountable any time soon.
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