In addition to planning a general amnesty for Twitter users whose accounts were suspended, Elon Musk appears ready to air some of the dirty laundry from the platform’s vaults under the previous management. Musk has been posting a series of polls that asked users to weigh in on proposed changes, such as restoring Donald Trump’s account. But one user posted a poll of their own, asking about the possibility of Musk making public any internal documents related to the decision to suspend the account of the New York Post after they published their bombshell article about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in the weeks prior to the 2020 election. Musk chimed in on the poll himself, saying such a revelation would be “necessary to restore public trust.” He’s expected to make the documents public in the coming weeks. (New York Post)
Elon Musk has insisted that full disclosure on Twitter’s decision to censor The Post’s exclusive story about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop is “necessary” in order to restore public trust in the social media giant.
The world’s richest man, who purchased the platform last month, made his position clear late Wednesday when he responded to a Twitter user who asked whether the internal communications that led to the censorship decision should be released.
“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,” the user tweeted.
Twitter’s new CEO quickly responded: “This is necessary to restore public trust.”
Assuming he delivers the goods, this revelation could be interesting in a couple of ways. If shutting down the NY Post (America’s oldest continuously-published newspaper) was a strictly internal decision, that won’t come as much of a surprise to most people. It was obvious that Twitter was censoring any stories that might cast Joe Biden or his family in a bad light as the presidential election approached. This would just be further confirmation of something that was clear to anyone who cared to examine the question honestly.
But if any of those internal documents turn out to have been sent to or from people inside Biden’s team, the entire story changes. Thanks to the actions of various whistleblowers, we already know that The Biden administration has been coordinating with most of the social media tech giants to censor news or opinions that buck the Democratic narrative. But most of that action has taken place after Biden took office.
What if Biden’s team was doing that before he was even elected? On the one hand, that wouldn’t be a First Amendment question because Biden was technically a private citizen at that point. But Twitter would have been even more of a bad actor in that scenario. Rather than just “cooperating with the government” to censor media outlets, they would have been working directly to influence the election of their own accord. The people in charge at the time would clearly need to be held accountable.
The GOP is already planning a series of hearings and investigations once they officially take back the Majority in the House. Perhaps Twitter’s history of dipping the bird’s beak into our elections could be another subject of inquiry. Something rotten has been going on for quite a while now and the public deserves to know what was actually happening.