New Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that there will be “more smoking guns” after he and a journalist released “The Twitter Files” late last week that revealed how Twitter’s previous management censored a New York Post article about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election.
“We’re just [going to] 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 Saturday during a Twitter Spaces event. There was, he added, “a very different standard applied to Republican candidates in the U.S. versus Democrat candidates” by the company’s management before he bought it two months ago.
Musk said he believes there are “more smoking guns” from Twitter that he wants to reveal. He did not elaborate.
“It’s frankly the behavior that is to be expected from an organization that is based in San Francisco which is far left,” Musk said in the Twitter Spaces event, according to media outlets over the past weekend.
Musk appeared to have provided the internal files to journalist Matt Taibbi, who released them Friday night, and former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss. Both operate Substack pages.
In a lengthy Twitter thread, Taibbi posted screenshots of internal conversations amongst Twitter employees that indicated certain posts were flagged for removal by members of the Democrat National Committee and then-candidate Joe Biden’s campaign.
“More to review from the Biden team,“ the employee said, while another Twitter worker replied with ”Handled these.”
Taibbi wrote that the move to censor the NY Post’s report, which included blocking sharing of the article in direct messages, was “made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.”
After Musk purchased the company for $44 billion, all of its top management departed or were reportedly fired. That included Gadde and former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.
But Taibbi said that there was “no evidence–that I’ve seen–of any government involvement in the laptop story,” adding that “in fact, that might have been the problem.”
Feedback
Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who recently departed the firm after Musk bought the social media platform in October, on Friday accused Musk and Taibbi of endangering the individuals who censored the Hunter Biden story. A number of left-wing journalists, meanwhile, sought to downplay the censorship apparatus that apparently had existed at Twitter.Republicans cited the material as proof that Twitter attempted to censor or hide stories and posts that were unfavorable to Biden during the 2020 campaign.
When the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story was published in October 2020, it was dismissed by left-leaning journalists, mainstream outlets, and even some former intelligence officials as Russian disinformation. Some of those same news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, reported that the laptop was authentic many months later.
In a more recent development, Musk wrote Saturday he thought it was “possible” that personnel at the social media firm gave preference to left-wing candidates during Brazil’s election.
“I’ve seen a lot of concerning tweets about the recent Brazil election,” Musk wrote on Twitter when asked by a user about elections possibly “handled” by the company’s previous management.
Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, just days before Brazil’s presidential second-round runoff vote, when incumbent Jair Bolsonaro was defeated by leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
“If those tweets are accurate, it’s possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left-wing candidates,” added the billionaire.
