For weeks now, Twitter’s new chief Elon Musk has been promising to reveal what really happened behind the scenes at the social media platform in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.
Well, yesterday, Musk did — through the journalist Matt Taibbi. It’s a big story, one that free speech supporters everywhere should take seriously, especially in the United Kingdom where we are on the verge of passing the Online Safety Bill. What happened at Twitter in 2020 shows how easily concern about ‘safety’ can, under political pressure, morph into corruption and censorship.
Taibbi, apparently directed by Musk, has released a long Twitter ‘thread’ citing company emails which show how the website colluded with political actors to censor sensitive information in the run up to the 2020 election. The most shocking document is this one:
What that message suggests is that Joe Biden’s campaign would flag content it didn’t approve of and Twitter would simply ‘handle’ — i.e.
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