Just a day after Twitter accepted Elon Musk's offer to buy the company for $44 billion, the Tesla CEO slammed the social media platform’s 2020 censorship of the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story as “incredibly inappropriate.”
Musk, who has promised to open Twitter back up to free speech,” blasted Twitter’s earlier decision to suspend the account of the New York Post for publishing a story alleging that information taken off a laptop belonging to the president’s son showed evidence of potentially illegal business dealings between Hunter Biden and China – connections that also implicated President Biden, who was running for the office at the time the story broke.
Twitter suspended the New York Post and locked the accounts of anyone caught sharing the link to the news story. Other social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, also censored the story (including ours at MRCTV).
Musk on Tuesday called the suspension “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk tweeted, in response to claims that Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer, is upset over Musk buying the company.
Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022
The Hunter Biden laptop story was later confirmed by the New York Times, nearly two years after it was first reported by the New York Post and more than a year after the 2020 presidential election.
One MRC poll found that 36 percent of Biden voters said they’d never heard the story before they headed to the polls, with more than 9 percent saying that if they’d been aware of the information, they would have changed their vote.
That much support lost would have cost Biden the election and given Trump the victory with 311 electoral votes. Such censorship has led many conservatives to call for stripping social media companies of their Section 230 protections if platforms act as editorial publishers rather than platforms for free speech.