Twitter CEO Elon Musk suggested over the weekend that the social media platform might have interfered in Brazil’s recent presidential election when far-left activists had control of the company.
Musk made the revelation in response to a question from Rebel News correspondent Avi Yemini, who asked, “Can you find out what other elections were ‘handled’ by the former Twitter regime?”
“I’ve seen a lot of concerning tweets about the recent Brazil election,” Musk tweeted Saturday. “If those tweets are accurate, it’s possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left wing candidates.”
I’ve seen a lot of concerning tweets about the recent Brazil election. If those tweets are accurate, it’s possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left wing candidates.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a populist, lost a fairly close election in late October against leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who previously served as the country’s president.
Yemini’s question of wanting to know what elections Twitter staffers “handled” comes after Musk released internal company documents through journalist Matt Taibbi late last week that showed Twitter was working in conjunction with then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s team, removing tweets that team Biden wanted deleted.
Musk said that he decided to release the information because it was “necessary to restore public trust” in the platform after it censored the New York Post’s bombshell report about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
“Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly,” Taibbi said. “By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’”
Taibbi’s post shows that on October 24, team Biden asked for five tweets to be removed. According to Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon, those tweets were either drug-related photos of Hunter Biden or pornographic photos of him.
9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party: pic.twitter.com/4uzkHnQ65E
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Sr. Director, Head of Trust & Safety, complained about Musk’s decision to release internal company communications showing how the company censored the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” Roth posted on Mastodon.