Elon Musk has axed thousands of jobs at Twitter.
Susan Walsh/AP
Elon Musk says he’s releasing details on Twitter’s “suppression” of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Twitter initially restricted distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign.
Musk has said making the company’s internal deliberations public “is necessary to restore public trust.”
Twitter owner Elon Musk says he’s releasing details at 5 p.m. ET on what he says was Twitter’s “suppression” of a controversial story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election when the site was under different ownership.
Musk also tweeted that it would be “awesome” and there would be a “live Q&A” on the topic.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022
The New York Post story about the laptop in October 2020, less than a month before the election, claimed to contain emails retrieved from a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Twitter initially limited distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign. Twitter quickly backtracked on its response, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey calling the decision to block the link “unacceptable.” Other news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, later confirmed the validity of several of the laptop’s contents long after the election.
Last month, Musk tweeted that making public internal discussions about decisions regarding the story “is necessary to restore public trust.”
He later tweeted that “Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections.”
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, asked Musk for these documents in October as part of their investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. No evidence to date has suggested that Hunter Biden’s work influenced his father’s policy decisions.
Comer on Thursday told Insider during an interview at the US Capitol that Musk’s recent tweet had given Republicans hope that he would provide information.
“We’re hopeful,” he said. “He pretty much admitted there was wrongdoing” at Twitter.
The announcement is likely to inflame former President Donald Trump, who in August demanded reinstatement as president or “a new Election, immediately” after news that Facebook temporarily limited the laptop story. Trump was responding then to comments from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook limited the story’s reach on the site’s news feeds for five or seven days amid questions about the content.
Insider’s Kelsey Vlamis contributed to this story.