Newly minted Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk revealed Wednesday that under [previous] leadership, the social media giant did in fact interfere in elections. Musk promised “Twitter 2.0” will change course and operate transparently on the issue.
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
Most infamously, Twitter banned any mention of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. By default, they also censored Joe Biden’s deep involvement and shady business dealings with foreign adversaries.
At the time platform executives, including then-CEO Jack Dorsey, justified the multi-month banning of the account belonging to the New York Post — the nation’s oldest paper — whose reporters broke the laptop story in October 2020. They also banned White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany after she shared the story, along with countless others who did the same.
During testimony on Capitol Hill in 2021, Dorsey admitted the social media platform had no factual basis for censoring the story.
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Users Celebrate Elon Musk Revealing Twitter ‘Interfered in Elections:’ ‘New Twitter Rocks’
Conservatives buzzed after Elon Musk admitted that, prior to his ownership, Twitter “interfered in elections.”
He pledged that under him the company, which he dubbed “Twitter 2.0,” will be more effective and “transparent” than the previous iteration.
Musk provided his remarks in response to a comment on a recent Reuters article that reported former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth’s claims that Twitter is not safe under Musk.
At the same conference, Roth – who left Twitter shortly after Musk took the reins – admitted it was a “mistake” for Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
[An] account stated, “Twitter has shown itself to be not safe for the past 10 years and has lost users’ trust. The past team of ‘trust and safety' is a disgrace, so it doesn’t have any right to judge what is being done now. They had a chance, but they sold their souls to a corporation.”
via joemiller