By Jon Dougherty. Media: Explain America.
OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has responded to a post from Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake after she took to the platform to ask him whether a separate post from someone else regarding a lawsuit she has filed regarding the election was being censored.
In recent days, Lake filed a 70-page lawsuit against election officials in Maricopa County, alleging, among other things, issues at dozens of polling places on Election Day last month disenfranchised voters and cost her victory against Democratic Secretary of State and now declared gubernatorial-elect Katie Hobbs.
In a tweet containing a screengrab of another post from a journalist with the Arizona Sun-Times who wrote about the lawsuit, Lake asked on Sunday: “Is Twitter still suppressing election criticism & news? Notice how the ReTweet/Comment/Like features are disabled on the tweet about my Election Lawsuit? @elonmusk what’s up with this??”
Not long after, Musk responded with a tweet that did not dismiss Lake’s concerns out of hand, though seemed to also come with a suspension warning.
“Reasonable criticism of elections and judicial challenges are, of course, lawful. That seems to be the case here,” he wrote, adding: “Clear incitement to violence will result in suspension and significant deception should result in a @CommunityNotes correction.”
Reasonable criticism of elections and judicial challenges are, of course, lawful. That seems to be the case here.
Clear incitement to violence will result in suspension and significant deception should result in a @CommunityNotes correction.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2022
The Sun-Times piece by Rachel Alexander quotes Kurt Olsen, one of Lake’s attorneys, as saying he believes the election anomalies cited in the legal action were “intentional since they didn’t test all of their equipment and follow the appropriate processes when problems arose.”
He asked, “Why haven’t they done their own forensic audit 30 days later?”
The report added:
He said Maricopa County officials’ cavalier attitude about the problems and their lack of trying to find out what happened is telling. “Does anybody believe this widespread failure, oh shucks, just happened?” he wondered.
The complaint alleged that the number of illegal votes cast in the election “far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin” between the two candidates, a difference of .67 percent. It said Democrat Katie Hobbs did not receive the highest number of votes due to illegal votes.
Musk has made several changes to the platform and appears to be earnestly trying to bring balance to the platform in terms of so-called ‘allowable’ speech. Some observers noted in response to his statement regarding Lake’s election story complaint that, under the previous management team, users were censored or even suspended outright for even questioning alleged anomalies during the 2020 election cycle.
He is also moving to ensure that users on the platform are genuine, announcing over the weekend that he is removing more than 1.5 billion accounts.
In a series of tweets, he also mentioned that Twitter would be adding a new feature.
“Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts,” he said. “These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log in for years.”
“Tweets will show view count in a few weeks, just like videos do. Twitter is much more alive than people think,” he also said.
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he said in another tweet.
One of the recent dump of “Twitter Files” showed that officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were in weekly communication with Twitter brass in the weeks leading to the 2020 election.
“Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech,” the journalist said.
He followed that with a screenshot of a Twitter employee saying, “Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?”
Taibbi also noted that the former Twitter executive management team appeared to relish their power and pledged to continue wielding it against major public figures.
“As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The ‘new administration,’ says one exec, ‘will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary,’” he revealed.
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