(RightIsRight.co) – Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, admitted the social media platform “has interfered” in US elections and has vowed to make public internal documents exposing that.
“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,” Musk wrote in a post.
His tweet was in response to a post by the Reuters news agency, which covered remarks by Yoel Roth, the former head of “Trust and Safety,” who is described by Breitbart News as an “extreme leftist.”
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October, Roth was the social media platform’s head “censor.”
Roth spoke earlier this week at a Knight Foundation conference, stating he resigned from Twitter after it changed ownership because Musk acted like a “dictator.”
“One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy… there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do,” Roth insisted.
The former executive also declared that Musk had not managed to make Twitter “safer.”
The Reuters coverage of the former “chief censor’s” remarks led one user to comment that Twitter had been no better in the decade before the billionaire took over.
“Twitter has shown itself to be not safe for the past 10 years and has lost users’ trust. The past team of ‘trust and safety’ is a disgrace, so it doesn’t have any right to judge what is being done now. They had a chance, but they sold their souls to a corporation,” the user wrote.
The user’s reaction sparked Musk’s response, in which he admitted the Big Tech company’s past interference in US elections, presumably by censoring conservative users and news coverage.
His election interference admission on Twitter’s behalf was characterized as an “explosive assertion” in a Fox News report.
“Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed,” the world’s richest person promised in the same tweet.
In a Joe Rogan podcast interview earlier this year, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg also admitted that his social media platform censored the Hunter Biden stories before the 2020 election after pressure from the FBI.
One of the most striking cases of Twitter’s previous pro-leftist censorship was in October 2020, ahead of the presidential election, when the platform censored the first story based on leaks from the lost laptop of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
Twitter’s then-management censored the story by The New York Post based on a rule about hacked materials, leading to a 16-day suspension of the news outlet’s account – despite claims by former CEO Jack Dorsey that it was restored “almost immediately.”
During the 2020 election campaign, Twitter censored posts by then-US President Donald Trump before banning him altogether in the wake of the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol, a decision only recently reversed by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
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.
Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022
