Tipsheet

Here's What Has Musk Concerned After Release of Twitter Files

Twitter chief Elon Musk opened up on Saturday about the threats he’s receiving amid the release of the Twitter Files—the internal documents that show how the company responded to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

As Townhall detailed, internal emails reveal how employees at the social media giant “handled” requests from the Biden Team and DNC to take content off the site and control the information Americans knew about the laptop from hell.  As Musk commented, “Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was absurd.”

Speaking during a two-hour Q&A chat on Twitter Spaces, Musk spoke about the risk of being assassinated, saying he wouldn’t be “doing any open-air car parades, let me put it that way.”

“Frankly the risk of something bad happening to me, or even literally being shot, is quite significant,” he said.

“It’s not that hard to kill somebody if you wanted to, so hopefully they don’t, and fate smiles upon the situation with me and it does not happen,” Musk added. “There’s definitely some risk there.”

Musk gave access to the internal documents to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and said there would be an “episode two.”

“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,” Musk said.

Taibbi kicked off the Twitter Files release on Friday evening.

"What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter," Taibbi wrote in a thread. "The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story."

The emails show Twitter's content moderation team took steps to wipe the social media site of stories about the laptop without former Twitter head Jack Dorsey's knowledge. 

"Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be 'unsafe,'" wrote Taibbi. "They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography."