Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Friday afternoon that he will release more information about how the platform censored the New York Post’s bombshell report about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Musk tweeted, “What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!”
What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022
“This will be awesome,” Musk added. “Will include live Q&A.”
Will include live Q&A
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022
The statement from Musk comes after said last month that releasing details of what happened was “necessary to restore public trust” in the platform.
The New York Post first reported messages from Biden’s laptop in October 2020, weeks before a presidential election. Social media giants, including Twitter, cracked down on the story to prevent its spread. Current and former national security officials claimed at the time that the Biden story was likely Russian disinformation and a veiled attempt from Moscow to intervene in U.S. elections.
Media outlets such as The Washington Examiner, CBS News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have confirmed the laptop’s contents and messages, in part regarding foreign business deals Hunter Biden worked on in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.
Twitter initially banned the Post’s story on the social media platform. Users were blocked from posting the link to the story or direct messaging it to other users. Twitter also locked the Post’s account for weeks, saying that the Post’s story violated Twitter’s rules against “hacked materials” despite lacking evidence that the materials were obtained through hacking.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admitted that Twitter made a mistake in taking action against the Post over its Biden laptop story.
“We were called here today because of an enforcement decision we made against the New York Post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent Twitter from being used to spread hacked materials. This resulted in us blocking people from sharing a New York Post article publicly or privately,” Dorsey said in November 2020 testimony to Congress. “We made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread. Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”
Former Twitter Trust and Safety boss Yoel Roth admitted last month that the company made a “mistake” by censoring the story.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately, for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said. “But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ alarm bells.”
Roth further noted that he felt “a responsibility to protect the integrity” of conversations relating to foreign governments attempting to interfere in elections on the platform, which ultimately led to the platform removing content surrounding the Post’s report and suspending the news outlet’s account for weeks.
“There were lots of reasons why the entire industry was on alert,” Roth added.
Tim Pearce and Brandon Drey contributed to this report.