House Democrat staffers were urging Twitter to further restrict access to information in the belief that the “First Amendment isn't absolute,” according to internal Twitter emails that were released via Twitter CEO Elon Musk through Matt Taibbi late on Friday evening.
The emails were about the suppression by Twitter of Hunter Biden laptop story that broke leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
In the correspondence, Carl Szabo of research firm Net Choice had sent Twitter's Director for Public Policy, Lauren Culbertson, a survey of 12 staffers from the House of Representatives including 9 Republicans and 3 Democrats.
Szabo replied to Culbertson that Democrat staff complained about how Twitter “let conservatives muddy the water and make the Biden campaign look corrupt.”
They also made a comparison of the Hunter Biden laptop story to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, in which the then secretary of state created an unsecure private server in her basement that held work as well as classified emails. Even though she was required to hand over the data, thousands of email messages were erased.
Szabo wrote:
“They attributed this to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. She did nothing wrong, but because the media refused to let the story be forgotten, it was an outrage that was way beyond its proportion. In their minds, the social media industry is doing the same as it isn't able to moderate dangerous content, so when it does, as it did last week, it's now an issue. If the media companies had more moderation, conservatives wouldn't be able to make use of social media for propaganda, deception, or for anything else.”
The Democrats were on the same page with social media's need to be more moderated, as they are corrupting democracy and making “truth” relative. When asked what the government could insist on this, in line in accordance with respecting the First Amendment, they demurred: “the First Amendment isn't absolute.”
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has pledged to improve transparency and the trust of the public in Twitter.
On the 23rd of November, 2022, he posted: “The more I learn, the more difficult it becomes. The world should be aware of the truth about what has been happening on Twitter. Transparency can win the trust of people.”
