Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, disclosed last week during an interview that developers at the social media platform had uncovered a line of code that dates back more than a decade and would censor tweets if they contained specified terms.
During an interview with The Babylon Bee that was released on Twitter on Wednesday, Musk made the comments. The fact that Twitter has previously censored The Babylon Bee was one of the acts taken by the firm that piqued Elon Musk’s interest in purchasing the company.
“One of the craziest things you did when you took over Twitter was start releasing the Twitter files,” Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee, said to Musk. “Who takes over a company and then says, ‘Look, how horrible all this stuff is that’s going on’?”
“If we’re not going to expose the things that were done wrong, why should people believe us in the future? That’s why we’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Musk responded. “Don’t take my word for it – literally look at the algorithm, you should be able to recreate the results that you see on Twitter using that algorithm.”
“So we’re trying to make sure that everything is brought to light, not just so there’s no hidden layers or anything,” Musk added. “We just discovered last week some hidden layer of censorship that was written in 2012.”
Musk said that while “‘censorship’ is probably the wrong word” to describe the code, Twitter had a list of words it would use to evaluate Tweets.
“If you put ‘suck’ in a tweet, then it does not get amplified on the platform,” he explained. “And that was literally code from like 2012. We found this relic of code last week.”
Musk stated that a single line of code was being applied to all tweets and mentioned that there were approximately one thousand terms on a list that, if used in a tweet, would cause that tweet to be suppressed.
WATCH:
@elonmusk reveals he’s still uncovering hidden censorship layers in Twitter’s code. pic.twitter.com/b4B1oBiSZU
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2023
