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Twitter boss Elon Musk: "It's going to be great"
Photo: Samuel Corum / AFP
Elon Musk had high hopes for it - the "Twitter Files", which the new boss of the social network had been announcing for days, should finally prove what Musk had suspected for a long time: politically motivated censorship?
Everyday on Twitter.
"The public has a right to know what really happened," Musk wrote days ago, announcing a report on the suppression of free speech: "It's going to be great."
The so-called Twitter files were finally published on Saturday night.
Not Musk himself, but freelance journalist Matt Taibbi presented the key findings in a lengthy Twitter thread, complete with screenshots from internal emails, messages from politicians, and comments from the former moderation team.
However, Musk left little doubt that he himself was the originator of the leak.
What all these documents are supposed to show is clear to the billionaire: Twitter "suppressed freedom of expression by order of the government".
A practice that should only come to an end with him - Musk.
But: is that true?
The scandal laptop
The published documents are specifically about an incident in October 2020. In the middle of the hot phase of the presidential election campaign, the conservative tabloid "New York Post" ran a cover story about Joe Biden's son Hunter and his controversial business connections in Ukraine.
The main source was apparently a laptop that Hunter Biden forgot to repair and that later made its way to the New York Post via detours.
As a result, many media doubted the story of the miraculous laptop and even mistakenly suspected a Russian disinformation campaign.
And the alarm bells also went off on Twitter: What could a possibly made-up story about Biden's relatives do shortly before the election?
The social network finally blocked the distribution of the article completely - a decision that was already controversial at the time, for which Twitter boss Jack Dorsey publicly apologized a little later.
The emails reveal little that is new
The e-mails that have now become public with Musk's help date from this time.
They show managers who are obviously struggling with the decision of their own moderation team - and who doubt whether it was right to prevent a media report even in private messages between users.
What the emails don't show: freedom of speech, which Musk had announced was suppressed "by order of the government."
It is true that among the wealth of documents there are also complaints and requests from the Democratic Party.
"More to check, from the Biden team," writes a manager at one point, the mail contains a list of links to individual tweets.
His colleague replies: »Done«.
However, the revelation has flaws: First, at the time of the emails, "Team Biden" was not in the government, but in the opposition.
Second, according to the documents, the Twitter moderation team also received and processed requests from those close to Donald Trump.
In addition, the links addressed apparently did not contain any politically explosive content, but illegally uploaded nude photos that also came from the Hunter Biden laptop.
Even journalist Taibbi, to whom Musk apparently confided the documents, writes: “There is no evidence – that I have seen – of government involvement in the laptop story.” That did not stop the Twitter boss from claiming the opposite .
He also promised his fans a sequel: "Tune in tomorrow for Episode 2 of the Twitter Files!"
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