The political left, in general, is not happy about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his goal of returning free speech to the platform. But, one left-wing comedian is.
The New York Post reports that Bill Maher not only has praised Musk’s acquisition of Twitter but he even told the Twitter censors who were in charge before Musk took over that they “failed.”
“You failed”
Maher, during Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s Real Time, came out and basically said that Twitter, before it was acquired by Musk, essentially set itself up for failure by engaging in censorship.
“The argument to me is, has Twitter failed in setting itself up in the past as the judge of what can go out there? And I would say yes, you have,” Maher said.
Maher continued by using some examples: Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, and Twitter’s censorship of the idea that the COVID pandemic originated from a Chinese laboratory.
“You failed when you threw the New York Post off of Twitter for talking about Hunter Biden’s emails, and it turned out that was a real story,” Maher said. “You failed when you said we couldn’t read about whether COVID had come from a lab.”
“You failed!” Maher emphasized.
A flashback
It was in October of 2020, in the lead-up to the presidential election, that the New York Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the one that he supposedly abandoned at a computer repair shop. Twitter responded with censorship.
The social-media giant proceeded to lock the Post out of its Twitter account claiming that their Hunter Biden report used hacked information, which violated Twitter’s policy. This, of course, wasn’t true, but Twitter proceeded to censor the Post for two weeks. Twitter also censored anyone who tried to share a link to the Post’s report by not letting them do so.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, appearing before Congress in November of 2020, would claim that the censorship was a “mistake.” During another congressional hearing in March 2021, he similarly called the censorship of the Post’s article a “process error.”
Whatever Dorsey wants to claim, though, the fact of the matter is that Big Tech censored a real story that involved Joe Biden when Joe Biden was running for president. That, as countless commentators have pointed out, is election interference, interference that could have had a big impact on the outcome of the 2020 election.
As they say, though, that’s all history now. The good news is that it appears that such history will not be repeated under Musk’s leadership of Twitter, which is exactly why most on the left are so against Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
