This afternoon Elon Musk just said he will be releasing Twitter’s censorship files. According to Musk it appears these are the files of the behind the scenes discussions about suppressing free speech on the platform.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” Musk wrote.
Lauren Boebert, an American politician, businesswoman said
For many years critics have been alleging Twitter is suppressing free speech on its platform but many other social media platforms have also been accused of the same. Twitter and Facebook in the past have either manipulated algorithms to bury posts, delete posts or just flat out permanently suspend and ban accounts of world leaders and other politicians including innocent everyday people.
The New York Post’s bombshell report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has now been verified by mainstream media, was censored by Twitter. Last week, Elon Musk promised to reveal the behind-the-scenes discussions at Twitter in 2020.
An undercover journalist for Project Veritas surfaced several videos of undercover interviews with Twitter employees openly admitting they are limiting certain types of free speech and how. Twitter denied the allegations made at the time.
A few years before the released undercover Twitter employee interviews, Agrawal, then Twitter CEO, said in a 2018 interview Twitter should “focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”
“Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard,” he went on. “And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content … how we direct people’s attention.”
Earlier this year after Musk man an offer to buy Twitter, he said Twitter should make its algorithm open source to increase transparency. Musk said that the public deserves a platform they can trust.
“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted, and broadly inclusive, is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.”
“I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” he said. “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. So it’s just really important that people have the both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law and so one of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people’s tweets or their emphasize or de-emphasized that action should be made apparent so you anyone can see that has been taken. So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”
Musk has also restored many previously suspended accounts, including those of the 45th President of the United States, author, mathematician, and cultural critic Dr. James Lindsay, and Project Veritas.
What ever is in these files Musk is saying he will be releasing is currently up for debate but according to his announcement soon we will know what secrets the free speech suppression documents hold.
