Elon Musk revealed that he believes Twitter should release the chat logs regarding their decision to restrict sharing a story from The New York Post on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
On Wednesday, Mr Musk responded to a tweet from the account @alx asking for the new owner of Twitter to look into the company’s decision to not allow people to tweet The Post’s story.
“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,” @ALX tweeted.
Mr Musk responded shortly thereafer in kind: “This is necessary to restore public trust.”
Many conservatives criticised Twitter for its decision to not allow people to tweet a 2020 story from The New York Post that alleged that emails on a laptop revealed that Mr Biden arranged to introduce a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi to his father President Joe Biden, who was then vice president of the United States.
At the time, Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, with Mr Pozharskyi. Republicans pushed the idea that as vice president Mr Biden helped oust Viktor Shokin as the top prosecutor in Ukraine as a means to benefit Burisma. Rather, Mr Biden and other Western leaders were pushing for Mr Shokin to be ousted.
Nevertheless, that led to Republicans to claim that the then-vice president engaged in corruption.
In 2019, former president Donald Trump asked then newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden in exchange for arms meant to go to Ukraine. That triggered the first impeachment trial for Mr Trump, for which he was later acquitted.
The following year, The New York Post published the story but Twitter prevented it from being shared on the grounds that it might be disinformation. Many major news outlets also chose not to promote the story because it was linked to Mr Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. The story turned out not to be disinformation, but other media outlets that independently verified emails found no illicit behavior from Mr Biden or his son.
Mr Musk’s move comes shortly after Republicans won back the House of Representatives. Many Republicans in Congress have pledged to investigate the younger Biden.
“Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government is the primary mission of the Oversight Committee,” incoming chairman James Comer said last week.
Since his takeover of Twitter, Mr Musk has taken a series of actions to appeal to the American right, such as reinstating Mr Trump’s Twitter account. He also promised “amnesty” to suspended Twitter accounts if they did not break the law or engage in “egregious spam.”
-Andrew Feinberg and John Bowden contributed reporting to this story.
