Elon Musk hints at releasing details of Twitter censoring Hunter Biden's laptop debacle

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is leaving no stone unturned to make sure that the social media giant becomes as transparent as it can be. On Wednesday, Musk favored a user who questioned if The Post’s exclusive story on the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter should be finally disclosed after being under censorship.

“Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of transparency,” the user said in a tweet. Responding to it, the Twitter boss said that the move was “necessary” in order to regain public faith.

“This is necessary to restore public trust,” Musk wrote in a tweet, which has garnered more than 193,000 likes and over 900 responses. While some users called Musk “the game changer,” others told him that it won't work. "Gain public trust? Nobody trusts you bro! ” one user said.

What is the Twitter-The Post debacle? 

In October 2020, platforms like Twitter and Facebook censored an article by The Post that revealed the emails that were found on an abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden which signaled potential corruption by now-President Joe Biden. As the bombshell article began to go viral, Twitter restricted users from sharing it and locked The Post from accessing its account for a period of two weeks due to suspicions over “the origins of the materials” in the article and violating the platform’s hacked materials policy.

Jack Dorsey, who headed Twitter at the time, later said at a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March 2021 that his company made a “total mistake” by censoring the report before the US presidential election. He justified freezing The Post’s account by stating that it happened due to a “process error.”

This isn’t the first time that Musk has spoken about the controversy. Earlier in April this year, he called Twitter’s decision “obviously incredibly inappropriate.” Meanwhile, Musk, who bought the company in a $44 billion deal last month, has often encouraged Twitter’s user base to weigh in on important matters following his takeover, such as reinstating the account of former US President Donald Trump and more recently, granting amnesty to accounts that have been suspended. “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” the Twitter chief asked users in a poll. Read the poll's outcome here.