Elon Musk blew the whistle on this shocking Twitter censorship scheme
Elon Musk purchasing Twitter marked a sea change for the site’s censorship policies.
The depths the prior regime sunk to silence users is still being exposed.
And Elon Musk blew the whistle on this shocking Twitter censorship scheme.
Twitter’s former leadership developed a massive censorship operation to silence users who didn’t toe the Democrat Party line.
Elon Musk promised to bring free speech to the social media giant after he purchased the company.
He’s still discovering how far the former leadership of the site went to censor users.
During an interview with The Babylon Bee, Musk revealed that Twitter engineers recently discovered code from 2012 that would suppress a Tweet if certain words are used.
“One of the craziest things you did when you took over Twitter was start releasing the Twitter files,” Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of the Bee, said to Musk. “Who takes over a company and then says, ‘Look, how horrible all this stuff is that’s going on’?”
Musk opened a window in the previous leadership’s censorship operation by releasing internal documents that led to the “Twitter Files” reporting.
“If we’re not going to expose the things that were done wrong, why should people believe us in the future? That’s why we’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Musk replied. “Don’t take my word for it – literally look at the algorithm, you should be able to recreate the results that you see on Twitter using that algorithm.”
Despite taking over Twitter last year, Musk is still discovering parts of the censorship operation put in place by the company’s previous leadership.
“So, we’re trying to make sure that everything is brought to light, not just so there’s no hidden layers or anything,” Musk added. “We just discovered last week some hidden layer of censorship that was written in 2012.”
He said that Twitter had a list of words that the site would use to evaluate Tweets.
“If you put ‘suck’ in a tweet, then it does not get amplified on the platform,” Musk explained. “And that was literally code from like 2012. We found this relic of code last week.”
Musk said that this single line of code that’s over a decade old was being used on every Tweet.
He added that Twitter’s former leadership came up with a list of over 1,000 words that would automatically suppress a Tweet if they were used.
Elon Musk has an enormous task in front of him to tear down the massive censorship operation he inherited at Twitter.