Internal Twitter emails released by Elon Musk via Matt Taibbi show that Democrat staffers wanted Twitter to censor more. The emails are related to Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
NetChoice’s Carl Szabo emailed then-head of public policy at Twitter Lauren Culbertson after polling 12 congressional staffers; three Democrats and nine Republicans. According to Szabo’s email, Democrat staffers complained that Twitter allowed conservatives to “muddy the water and make Biden campaign look corrupt.”
The Democrat staffers compared the Hunter Biden laptop story to the email scandal of Hillary Clinton, where she set up an unsecured server in her home that contained classified emails.
Szabo wrote of the Democrats: “They linked this to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal: she did nothing wrong but because the press wouldn’t let the story go, it became a scandal far out of proportion. In their mind, social media is doing the same thing: it doesn’t moderate enough harmful content so when it does, like it did yesterday, it becomes a story. If the companies moderated more, conservatives wouldn’t even think to use social media for disinformation, misinformation, or otherwise.
“The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they’re corrupting democracy and making all ‘truth’ relative. When pushed on how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: ‘the First Amendment isn’t absolute.’”
Elon Musk has promised more transparency to increase the public’s trust in Twitter. After a user requested documents related to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Musk said all internal documents about Twitter’s history of censorship would be published on Twitter.
