Censorship on Twitter has increased under the ownership of Elon Musk, to levels well above those of the previous regime, according to a bombshell new study from the Media Research Center.
The report comes despite public statements from Musk that he would run the platform as a haven for free expression.
The conservative media watchdog group recorded 293 cases of “documented censorship” between Nov. 4 and Mar. 4, a time when Musk first took the reins of Twitter and began mass layoffs.
Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022.
That’s a nearly 30% increase compared to the same period a year earlier, when 226 documented cases were recorded, the study found, citing data from CensorTrack.org.
Many of the censorship actions, about 62% of them, “involved tweets critical of the left’s transgender narrative,” the Media Research Center found.
The New York Post was briefly locked out of Twitter Thursday, which — in a Kafkaesque twist — occurred after the paper published a story about how the company was censoring posts about the Trans Day of Vengeance.
Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” — a premise which many are now questioning.“The remaining staff at Twitter are revolting against Musk’s efforts to foster a free speech environment on the platform,” the MRC concluded in a news release analyzing the findings. “Twitter has to do better if Twitter 2.0 is to be the ‘digital town square’ and ‘free speech’ haven owner Musk has said it should be.”
Twitter censorship has long been an issue. In October 2020, the company censored The Post’s reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop, working in conjunction with the Democratic party to secure the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.
The platform also famously banned Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, reinstating him in November after Musk ran a 24 hour poll of users to decide if the former president should be allowed to tweet again.
*Article From: The New York Post