Newly minted Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk revealed Wednesday that under previously 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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022
Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.
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.
Twitter doesn’t have a “censoring department” that blocked The Post from tweeting last fall, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday — but he wouldn’t reveal who was responsible for the blunder.
At a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media, Dorsey said Twitter made a “total mistake” by barring users from sharing The Post’s bombshell October report about Hunter Biden’s emails.
Twitter also locked The Post out of its account for more than two weeks over baseless charges that the exposé used hacked information — a decision Dorsey chalked up to a “process error.”
Polling taken after the 2020 presidential election showed a significant number of voters would not have cast their ballots for Biden if they had known about the contents of the laptop.
Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.
A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.
And an even higher number — 81% — said US Attorney General Merrick Garland should appoint a special counsel to investigate matters related to the first son’s infamous laptop, the existence of which was exclusively revealed by The Post in October 2020.
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