Elon Musk has long spoken about the suppression of speech on Twitter – one of his main reasons for acquiring the world’s largest microblogging site, along with several others.
The Twitter chief executive brought to light ‘Twitter Files’, an expose of sorts, that reveals how executives at the microblogging site deliberately censored a Hunter Biden’s laptop story – an article published in the New York Post in 2020.
Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist and author, posted a thread of tweets detailing how Twitter responded to a request “from the Biden team” during the 2020 election – shortly after they cracked down on the story on Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden.
“The ‘Twitter Files’ tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out of the control of its designer,” Taibbi tweeted.
Taibbi said while Twitter initially lived up to its mission statement of giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers”, things took a major turn in 2020 when tweets and content started being taken down frequently on the request of “connected actors”.