By Carmine Sabia. Media: Explain America.
OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Elon Musk wants everyone to know that his mental health is sound and he is not suicidal and he may have good reason to want that known.
As Musk had a live Q&A session on Saturday, after revealing the depths of how the Hunter Biden laptop story got squashed on Twitter and revealing how deep people in government were with Twitter, he believed that his mental status was pertinent information, The Epoch Times reported.
āI do not have any suicidal thoughts ā¦ If I commit suicide, itās not real!ā he said to around 100,000 listeners.
āMusk joked that given the revelations in the files and his expressed plans to ensure that political powers have no undisclosed influence at the company going forward, powerful figures and institutions may want him out of the way, The Times said.
āTwitter is the one company thatās no longer colluding and is no longer just going with this NPC group think, I should probably increase my security or something,ā the CEO said.
He also commented on the mediaās portrayal of Twitter as becoming a place for right wingers to create a āhellscapeā and said it was not true.
āAnd in fact there are far fewer bots, far fewer trolls and itās actually, I think, way more fun and interesting. And weāre seeing that in the user minutes and in the daily average users,ā he said.
And he said that before he became CEO Twitter was not unbiased when it came to rule enforcement.He said there was āa very different standard applied to Republican candidates in the U.S. versus a Democrat candidates.ā
āIām not saying this is definitely the case. There appears to have been a double standard where Democrats were not censored and left causes were not censored but right causes and Republicans were,ā the CEO said.
āI think this is frankly obvious to anyone who uses Twitter without any extra exposure of Twitter files. It was not even-handed,ā he said.
The Tesla, Starlink and Space X CEO said that āfrankly the behavior that is to be expected from an organization that is that is based in San Francisco, which is far left.ā
āSo from their standpoint, it wouldnāt seem like that theyāre being unfair,ā he said. āItās simply how they see the world.ā
On Friday night the Twitter CEO unveiled, what he called, the āHunter Biden story suppressionā files and it was a doozy.
He handed the task of unveiling the details of the scandal to independent journalist, and former liberal hero, Matt Taibbi.
āWhat youāre about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter,ā the journalist said.
āThe āTwitter Filesā tell an incredible story from inside one of the worldās largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer,ā he said before unleashing a torrent of information.
And what is more interesting is the CEO said more would be unveiled on Saturday.
āIn an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people āthe power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.ā
āAs time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
āSlowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools.
āOutsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
āBy 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another:
āMore to review from the Biden team.ā The reply would come back: āHandled.ā
āCelebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:
āBoth parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
āThis system wasnāt balanced. It was based on contacts.
āBecause Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.