Democrats are accusing Elon Musk of suppressing their tweets

Democrats are accusing Elon Musk of suppressing their tweets.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has been tweeting lately about the “Twitter Files,” internal company documents from before he took the helm. On Dec. 2, for example, he dangled insight into “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.” 

But we found no evidence that he tweeted the following words appearing in a screenshot trending across social media: “The Democrats paid the CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter millions of dollars to block and delete people’s pages during the 2020 election That posted anything about Hunter Biden’s laptop Let me say that again the democratic party paid millions to block stories about the Biden’s.”

“The gall of @elonmusk to ban respectable journalists doing important work from his platform while parading as some sort of champion of free speech is, quite frankly, detestable,” tweeted Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y. “I’d ask if he feels any shame, but meaningful self-reflection may simply be beyond his capacity.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is raising concerns about Twitter’s opaque financing and whether foreign interests could gain enough influence over the “digital town square” ahead of the 2024 election to pose a national security threat.  Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster all had their accounts suspended as of Thursday evening.

Musk indicated that the suspensions stemmed from the platform’s new rules banning private jet trackers.

Twitter began suspending accounts that track private jets, including one that tracks a jet owned by Musk called @ElonJet, on Wednesday.

In November, shortly after he took over Twitter, Musk tweeted that he would not ban the account. But this week, he decided that such accounts violated the site’s “doxxing” rules about revealing nonpublic personal information.